NationWide Ajay Shah

My wife and I (and our 1 year old son) have lived in Danbury, CT for about 6 months now. We came across a Townhouse for rent on Craigslist and contacted the realtor Ajay Shah. When we first went and looked at the place we thought it was perfect for us, everything we needed.
Ajay seemed to be friendly, he mentioned the townhouse was for sale and his friend was the owner. We briefly mentioned we were looking to buy in the near future and Ajay quickly became very pushy, doing everything he could to try to sell us this place even though we told him we only want to rent at the time. Ajay eventually stopped asking us to buy and told us the rental will be a 1 year lease and we would be all set to move in as long as the credit check came back okay whcih of course it did because we have close to a 800 credit score.
Ajay told us to bring him a $ 2800 check to his office and $ 50 cash for an application fee which we did promptly, this was all with the intensions of signing a 1 year lease. We told our current landlord that we will be moving out so we had multiple people in the mean time come look at our place since we were already scheduled to move out. Well, after a few weeks of giving him the money for the deposit and app fee he had not emailed us or called. We continuously emailed, called and text him and never got a response for days.
Once we finally got a hold of him he told us that the lease will now be a month to month since the owner (his friend) decided she didn’t want to do a 1 year lease. This was clearly because they wanted to sell the place and was just looking for someone to cover the mortgage until they found a buyer. to make a long story longer… he did the ol’ bait and switch on us, took all of our money and then told us it will no longer be a 1 year lease and told us we could not have our application fee back.
We have a 1 year old son, there is no way we can do a month to month lease, this would put us in a position to have to move out within 30 days notice, that type of insecurity is not possible with a child and he knew that.
needless to say we did not move, now we need to explain to our landord that we will be staying after we already told him we would be leaving.
Stay away from Ajay Shah, he is a scammer!