My Account has been Hacked

[Robin4]

They used to say 'A week is a long time in politics' .....Well I have to amend that....'A day is a long time as an STR host'!!

Last week I  had an almost full April, and May was looking ok, tonight I have two reservations left and I don't expect those to proceed either.

I am alright with that because....this Covid-19 thing has not singled me out....we are all in the same boat, although I am annoyed that Airbnb are allowing guests to cancel penalty free simply because........they can, I don't depend on this money like many do....it's a pleasant pastime to me!

What I think is highly unfair to me, today my account got stolen.......

First of all I got a couple of reservation enquiries this morning, one saying she wanted to book for 6 nights but my listing had a duplicate and she gave me the link to the duplicate and wanted to know which was genuine. She also puzzlingly stated that my listing was full of many bad reviews....was this correct?

When I looked at her profile there was nothing on it, no verifications, just a generic image and a, ' joined 2020'....but I am a trusting soul. 

Hot on its heals came another enquiry for the 22nd of this month wanting to know if I was still excepting reservations with the current virus situation.

I noted that both of these enquiries did not come via the usual .....61777 route......they came via Airbnb Admin authentication. I pre-approved the first enquiry and then clicked on the link given to the duplicate address, and alarm bells went off everywhere, my computer told me the site could not be reached and my antivirus went into overdrive with warning notifications, so I hurriedly removed the pre-approval. A quarter of an hour later the entire message stream with that 'guest' disappeared from my messages....just as though the interaction had never taken place! 

Next I got this email.......

I tried to ring CX to find out what was going on and to get them to verify the status of my account, but of course, with the volume of communication at this time could not get through and the call timed out after 30 minutes.

The next thing that happened I could not refresh my phone app, I was redirected to the log-in page and the log in details for my listing pertained to a UK phone number and different password.

I went back to scratch on the computer and tried to reset my password via email, and each time I tried to change the password and submit I was hit with the Oops ice-cream girl.

The great thing about living in Australia is while the bulk of the world is asleep, we are hard at it making the most of the day, I phoned CX again about 4.30pm local time and this time had a very limited delay in talking to someone. It appears that my account has been hijacked by someone in the UK and I have had to reset my password 3 times today to try and stay ahead of them. Prince....yes that's her name from CX was great, as I have found them all to be, and she is going to monitor my account for the next 48 hours for any further suspicious activity. 

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Why is it that these bast*rds always pick a time when the chips are down to sink the boots in. As hosts we are all going through hell at the moment and the last thing we need is to have our situation further compromised by bloody hackers! 

Good luck to all hosts, I hope this will blow over shortly and we can get back to entertaining a few guests!

Cheers.......Rob

[Brenda328]

I just had one yesterday that was very similar except it came directly into my email and was supposedly from verbo (this site won't let me enter the actual name, but you all probably recognize my coded name for Airbnb's primary competitor).  Anyhow, that email referenced that it saw my listing on both sites but that it was less expensive on Airbnb and was listed under someone else's name and they wanted me to confirm that was my property.  The email included a link to the other alleged listing.

Because it seemed suspicious (and that message from verbo was not in my inbox over there), I just hovered my mouse on the link in the email and did not click it.  I could see that it routed to a completely different site.

It appears that scammers realize that right now hosts are so desperate for business that some might be letting their guards down.  So, be safe out there everyone!