@Michelle53
As regular contributors to the CC are (painfully!) aware, I've been posting for years about scammers just like the ones outed in the London Wired articles, the US Vice articles, and the CBC AJ investigation. I've come across literally hundreds of them, in scores of different markets worldwide, with tens of thousands of listings between them, saved mountains of screenshots, written countless posts, and am sick to death at this point of banging on and on about them (and I'm sure everyone else is sick of me banging on about them too!)
The problem was though, for the longest time, nobody - not hosts, not CC'ers, not Airbnb, not the media, not authorities, not anyone - had the slightest interest in hearing a word about them, nor gave two sh*ts about what these scammers were up to, or what damage and destruction they were causing for everyone, but particularly for small local hosts who are being/have been pushed out of business by them, and for local residents who are being/have been pushed out of their homes -and their hometowns - by them.
I've been scorned, scolded, attacked, sneered at, blanked, labelled toxic and delusional, and called all sorts of names for trying to warn people what was happening, and all the while, the scammers were thriving and flourishing, and their numbers skyrocketing, in every town and city on the planet.(the 1% of hosts/15% of listings statistic doesn't even come close to describing the sheer scale of this issue) And yet, everyone was perfectly happy to turn a blind eye and ignore what was taking place right under their noses. Perhaps they thought that if they refused to acknowledge that the Airbnb platform was a lawless breeding ground for scammers, rogues and criminals, then it couldn't possibly be true. Airbnb, it seemed, were untouchable, invincible and irreproachable.
These fraudsters - not us - are the "hosts" that are plundering long-term rental stock, providing sh*t service to travellers, running unmonitored and often substandard listings, allowing anti-social guests to run rampage, destroying neighbourhoods, displacing local residents and forcing municipal authorities to bring in draconian regulations, which wipe out regular hosts, (but are ignored by the big boys)
So I can't begin to tell you how happy - and relieved - I am that the truth has finally started to leak out, drip by drip - not only about the scammers, but also about the supposedly "legit" mega-operators, who are also violating all sorts of laws and regulations behind their slick tech-bro facades, whilst being shielded, protected, supported and promoted by Airbnb itself (The epic NYC legal battle being just one case in point)
This is just the beginning - it won't be long now until the trickle turns into a torrent, and the whole world starts to see the true picture of the fraud, deception and corruption that's really going on in the Airbnb "ecosphere". And only then will the playing field start to level again for small, independent hosts, like us. It can't come soon enough.
