Hi Airbnb Community,
My wife and I love Airbnb, we use it both as guests and hosts. We have been renting out our spare room in our family home since January 2015.
Anyway this has been going really well and we love meeting so many awesome people. Unfortunately we had an annoying incident this week. We received an equiry from a lady to book for 4 days. This lady called Laura, had only a picture on her profile, it looked like a coporate picture with her name blocked out.
Laura had no information on her profile, no reviews and she also had no verification. She had however signed up in March this year. I thought I would give her the benefit of the doubt, a new user and so probably hasn't got round to it yet.
Anyway she initially sent a very short message stating the dates she wanted to stay and asked if we had fast wifi. I replied welcoming her to Airbnb, confirming the dates were available and asking for a bit more information about her, about why she comining to the area etc... She very quickly replied back and said her age, where she was from, that she was coming for business and pleasure, that she lived in London for the past year. She then said that she's seen our Airbnb room listed twice on Airbnb and said that the other listing was cheaper, she then provided a link.
This is where I made a big mistake (facepalm), wondering what this was about I clicked on the link, it looked like the normal airbnb website, however it mentioned 'associates' in the URL link. It went straight to the login in page and so I logged in (so stupid) and it went straight to a room in America that was definitely not my room (I'm from the UK).
I logged out, thinking this was weird and replied to Laura saying that the link didn't go to my room and confirmed the price of our room and asked if she would like to know any more information about our area. There was then no reply from her.
When my wife got home from work we spoke about it and feeling uncomfortable I phoned Airbnb, they were very helpful, they told me it was a scam link and that they would pass it to the Trust and Safety team. I was advised to change my Airbnb password. There was a 3 hour gap between me clicking and logining in on the scam link and me changing my password.
The Airbnb Trust and Safety team got back to me 24 hours later saying that they had removed Laura's profile (guessing the person probably wasn't called Laura) and repeating to change my password.
Anyway I was wondering if any other hosts have sadly experienced this? I can't help but still worry, is changing my password enough? Could this person have done something to my airbnb account that I'm not aware of yet?
Thanks in advance for your support and advice.
Nick