Our resorvation was a scam

[Lara1189]

Help,

How do we get a refund? We made the reservation just fine but when the got here the house was occupied by a family. They have been living here for 3 years. I tried going through the message and phone call the "host", with no results/no answered call or voicemail box set up. There is also no phone number to call Airbnb. 

[Inna22]

@Lara1189 this is crazy! There is a help button in the app. It will offer you to either call or chat. Do you have somewhere to stay? Do not worry, you will get a refund. You can also dispute it with your credit card but try going through Airbnb first- this listing has to be shut down

[Lisa723]

@Lara1189 

United States and Canada

+1-415-800-5959

[Lara1189]

Thank you for the phone number. I did go through the contact tab with airbnb. Only got a bot chat and filed a report. Still waiting to hear from airbnb. Never could find a number for airbnb though and I went through all the different links looking. And, yes, we searched around and found a hotel. We had driven 7 hours already and the children were driving us bonkers so needed a place fast.

[Lara1189]

This was our very first time going through airbnb. It makes for a bad experience and one I don't ever want to try again. 

[Sarah977]

@Lara1189 Was this booking made by finding and booking a listing on the actual Airbnb site, or did you answer some ad you found elsewhere which sent you a link, and paid by sending money somewhere? 

If the latter, it was a total scam which actually has nothing to do with Airbnb and which they can't do anything about. The only thing you could try to do is stop the payment you sent. These online scams are rampant.

If you booked it through the official Airbnb site and Airbnb charged the credit card you have on file with them, then Airbnb customer service will help you out and give you a refund.

[Lara1189]

I booked through the official Airbnb site. I had signed onto the web page in my account. 

[Sarah977]

@Lara1189  Oh, good. Then you should get refunded, but it might take a while. Customer service is pretty slow to repond these days. But the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so if you don't hear back soon, don't be shy to demand some action.

So sorry you had this experience. It's not the norm, by any means. I'm sure the family in that house were pretty shocked, too.

[Anonymous]

@Lara1189  It's incredible how easy it is to make a phony listing - many homeowners have been puzzled to find an Airbnb listing made out of pictures and specs cobbled together from old real-estate ads for their homes, often not even in the same part of the world as the actual property. A reverse-image search can sometimes yield clues.

I can see how this experience would put you off using Airbnb again, especially considering how hard it is to reach customer service in an emergency. But for what it's worth, some listings are a much safer bet than others. If you see that a listing has been established for a long time, has consistently great reviews from real people, a host with a complete personal profile and visible face photo, no host cancellations, and a price that isn't "too good to be true," you can book with reasonable confidence that it's not a scam listing. A new and unreviewed listing can also be totally legit, but based on my experiences I wouldn't personally book one again.