Account suspension? Why?

[Dinesh37]

I hope this doesn't turn into too long a read, I'll try and simplify it.

6 weeks ago, I got a booking from a gentleman. I forget whether it was instant booked, or he sent a request, and I don't know whether all that is relevant to what happened; but his booking got confirmed by me. I proceeded to give him my contact details  as I do with all my guests. It was a same day booking. A few hours later, the guest messaged me to say his booking had been cancelled, and whether I had cancelled it. I said no, and asked him to contact Airbnb. I also messaged Airbnb Help to ask them what the issue was. 

The guest later messaged me and told me he had contacted Airbnb and they informed him that his account was under investigation and there was some issue with his payment. Fair enough, I told him that was out of my hands, and once he had sorted his issue out with Airbnb, he was welcome to make a fresh reservation. That was the extent of my conversation with him.

I later received an email from Airbnb saying that "the payment for reservation XXXXXXXX was fraudulent, which is a violation of the Security section of the Airbnb Community Standards, which you agreed to in the Terms of Service." 

It went on to say - "We realize that you may not have known that this incident violates the Airbnb Terms of Service. These situations are often known as “money mule scams” and they're not limited to Airbnb. They can happen when a guest books a reservation, but then says they will not stay at the property and requests a partial refund outside of Airbnb."

I figure that this guest was probably trying to use someone else's card to pay for his reservation (credit card fraud is common in this region of the world), and had been caught out. What I don't understand is, how does that make me a violator of Airbnb's terms? I did nothing but accept a booking request. This guest didn't ask me about refunding or paying outside the system, so I'm not sure what scam I'm supposed to have taken part in? As far as I was concerned, I was also a victim together with Airbnb, so why did they suspend my account? On what basis? Is it up to us hosts to weed out the criminals? 

I have spent the past 6 weeks trying to get them to reactivate my account, and that just happened yesterday. But this experience has made me very worried that another fraudulent payer could choose my listing and then if/when he gets caught, I could get punished for it? I have 7 listings with Airbnb, am a superhost and have made significant investments to improve my guest experience - but the fact that I could just be switched off for no fault of mine has me very rattled.

They turned me back on yesterday with a warning that if this happens again, I could be kicked off the platform permanently. I've been trying to get them to give me more details on what my part was supposed to have been in this scam, but I've gotten no response so far. 

Have any of you been through something like this? And what did you do? 

[Helen3]

If I got a fraudulent booking @Dinesh37  I would contact Airbnb, flag the request with them and ask them to cancel the booking.

As you are confident the guest never mentioned any fraudulent activity, I would contact Airbnb  again and ask them to review the case and remove the note on your account that you violated their terms. Try them on social media.

Good luck.

[Dinesh37]

@Helen3 Hi, The issue is I don't know from the outset if the guest is doing fraudulent activity. Airbnb only let me know AFTER the fact, when they had cancelled his reservation, and lumped me in with him as a co-conspirator.

[Lisa723]

@Dinesh37 my guess would be you are an algorithmic victim here. I've occasionally had guest inquiries that trigger a bot popping up to tell me that the inquiry looks suspicious and inviting me to report the guest. Clearly no human judgment was involved. I expect it is possible the same can happen on the other end. I agree with @Helen3 's advice.

Also, hosts get summarily delisted without explanation with some regularity, as you will see if you watch this forum and similar FB pages, etc.. Some are not lucky enough to get themselves reinstated. For this reason I would not recommend keeping all your eggs in Airbnb's basket. List on other platforms as well.

[Dinesh37]

Hi @Lisa723 , thanks for that insight. The issue is that none of the other platforms have much of a presence in my market. It's very disillusioning to know they can summarily do that when we put in so much to make our listings a source of regular income. 

[Sarah977]

@Dinesh37  Unless it was an algorithmic error, as Lisa suggested, this sounds like it was the result of a scam that lots of hosts have been getting. The booker's message to the host says that they propose paying for the reservation, but not actually staying. Then, you send them half the money, so you get paid for a booking that doesn't even take place. That is the gist of their message. It's a stolen credit card scam. You send them half the money, then their payment is rejected. Is it possible that the Request or Inquiry you received for this booking read like that and that you weren't paying close attention and just accepted the booking?

If you ever get a message like that in the future, or anything else that sounds sketchy, report the account immediately to Airbnb, do not under any circumstances click on Accept or Pre-approve. 

[Dinesh37]

@Sarah977 Hi Sarah, yes, Airbnb's email to me alerted me of this kind of scam. But my case was nowhere close to this. It was a normal booking request, and the guest at no point made any reference to payments or refunds outside the system. It was just like any of my other transactions with other guests.

[Kelly149]

@Dinesh37 All hosts must realize that the ABB experience could dry up at any time for any reason and protect themselves accordingly. 
some examples:

-extenuating circumstances cancellation

-host account closed, with or without reason, known or unknown causes

-payment problems that ABB choses not to correct

-squatter guests

-unremedied damage issues

-etc etc etc

congrats on your reinstatement & dodging a scammer. Btw same day reservations are often problematic if you’re able to do without them that might help

[Dinesh37]

Hi @Kelly149 

Looks like I might have to revise my policy on same day reservations. I just had another one today, and it smacked of that previous reservation. I've pre-emptively alerted Airbnb this time, but they're so slow to respond.

The issue for me here is that they haven't explained to me what they think my role in this was. It just seemed like a template email they sent out, and their responses after that also seemed very template-like, and I didn't get the impression the case officer even looked at the details.

[Sarah977]

@Dinesh37  Yes, it was likely a cut-and-paste automated email. What I think may have happened is that this scammer was reported by other hosts who got a "let's do a booking I won't show up for and split the money" request from him, and then Airbnb's algorithm may have identified hosts who accepted this account's bookings, even though they didn't necessarily get the same request, or it might even have been an Instant Book, so the host didn't even get a booking message from this account.

There are other good reasons not to accept same-day or even 1-day notice bookings, although I realize that last-minute bookings may be some hosts' bread and butter, depending on the nature of their listing. Failure to collect payment is much more common on last-minute bookings, as there isn't enough time for the payment to go through definitively or be rejected by the credit card company. And although there are certainly valid reasons for someone needing a last-minute booking, they also tend to present more red flags- guests who haven't planned ahead and are always flying by the seat of their pants tend to be problematic in other ways, and these bookings also contain a higher percentage of people who are up to no good- partiers, drug dealers, prostitutes.

[Kelly149]

@Dinesh37 yes, this is a common problem... reasonable people think that ABB will act reasonably, this is not necessarily the case

[Sherry346]

Thank you for post.