Days or hours before the reservation was set to start, the host would abruptly tell them that the unit had developed a sudden and fatal plumbing issue.
Dozens of people told us that they’d booked an apartment or a house, in cities both in the U.S. One particular bait and switch seems popular: the plumbing scam. (In a surprising number of stories, the new house was often full of a weird number of beds, laid out in bizarre configurations.) Other times, they were persuaded by the host to switch apartments or houses entirely, only to find that the new location was filthy, unfurnished, or in a totally different part of town. Sometimes, the problem was deceptive photos that bore no resemblance to the place they arrived to find. One exceedingly common theme across hundreds of emails was the bait and switch: Airbnb users were promised one apartment and arrived to find something very different. Here are the most common Airbnb scams worldwide, broken down by category. People said they’d found themselves defrauded, stranded on the street in an unfamiliar city, booked into staying in a shed with no running water (a real email we received), or locked in a bizarre, lengthy argument over alleged damages to an area rug. If the emails we received are any metric to judge by, the process is long overdue. We will update our community in the coming months as we build out the specifics of our Verification Program. Hosts that pass our review will be identified clearly on the platform, but not all will pass initially. We are working on the details, and intend to use a combination of community, agent and technological techniques, including: Agent reviews and algorithmic screening of the listing contents, pictures, etc, guest verifications of specific features of a listing, in-person inspections, and virtual walk-throughs. “We will review listings for accuracy and quality and to confirm the identity of hosts,” the spokesperson said. On Twitter, Chesky added, “Trust on the Internet begins with verifying the accuracy of the information on Internet platforms - this is an important step for our industry.” He also said the company would begin offering what he called the Airbnb Guest Guarantee: “f a guest checks into a listing and it doesn’t meet our accuracy standards, we will rebook them into a listing that is just as nice - and if we can’t, they will get 100% of their money back.”Īn Airbnb spokesperson provided VICE with some additional details about how the verification process will work. “And I think this has been a gradual, maybe too gradual, transition for our industry.” In part, Chesky suggested Airbnb would start asking more specific questions of guests upon checkout-relying on users, in other words, to help police what happens on the platform. “I think many of us in this industry … are going from a hands-off model, where the Internet’s an immune system, to realizing that’s not really enough, that we have to take more responsibility for the stuff on our platform,” he said. Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO and co-founder, said at the DealBook conference that the verification process is part of a dawning realization that, as he put it, “we have to take more responsibility for stuff on our platform.” After Conti’s story, Airbnb promised to “verify” all 7 million listings on the site by December 2020. In the aggregate, these emails paint a portrait of a platform whose creators are fundamentally unable to track what goes on within it, and point to easily exploitable loopholes that scammers have steamed their way through by the truckload. (Or, in some cases, a combination of several of these scams.) Scammers all over the world, it seems, have figured how best to game the Airbnb platform: by engaging in bait and switches charging guests for fake damages persuading people to pay outside the Airbnb app and, when all else fails, engaging in clumsy or threatening demands for five-star reviews to hide the evidence of what they’ve done. The stories quickly started to fall into easily discernible categories. In response, we got nearly 1,000 emails, many of them outlining similar tales of deception. Hoping to get a better sense of the issue, we asked readers to tell us about their own experiences using Airbnb.
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