On March 6th, a member called Bj, started a thread in the CC called "Superhoax Paradox", exposing a "host" in Montreal, called AJ, who has 97 listings - many of them riddled with false reviews from fake profiles. Bj clearly demonstrated how the host was using the false reviews to scam the system in several ways. For example, when any of his listings got a god-awful review, it would be immediately followed by several stellar reviews from some of the dodgy profiles, all of which also reviewed all his other crappy listings. Bj reported this to Airbnb, but was told it "doesn't violate Airbnb's T&Cs, and posted the screenshot of the response he received from Airbnb Support to prove it, along with links to AJ's profile, and several of the profiles posting the false reviews.
Initially, the links to the profiles were deleted, and shortly afterwards, the entire thread disappeared too. Meanwhile, AJ's profile is still going strong today, with lots more false reviews from the same bogus profiles, and the vast majority of his listings at either 3.5 or 4 stars. (So much for being delisted for low ratings. Obviously, such punishments don't apply to the Pro's)
Yesterday, AJ hit the headlines, when he was featured as one of Canada's Top 5 Airbnb hosts, in a CBC investigative study, covering 32000 listings in 16 major cities, which uncovered huge "professional" operators and commercial entities, hiding behind fake profiles, posing as regular hosts. (Sonder, with thousands of listings in the US, Central and South America and Europe, and $135 million in funding behind them, is flying high at No 2 on the list)
"But while Airbnb promotes itself as a darling of the sharing economy, touting stays in real people's homes and relationships with personable hosts, its biggest players in Canada are actually — and often secretly — multimillion-dollar for-profit corporations, a CBC News data analysis found"
"Airbnb did not suggest that anyone CBC News spoke to was violating its terms of service"
This is not only happening in Canada. Nama any Airbnb market on earth and I'll show you a dozen similar instances in 5 minutes flat. This sh*t is destroying our cities and devastating our communities - your city, my city, every city on the planet. Airbnb is cynically using and exploiting its own "valued host community" as a Trojan Horse to hoodwink regulators and pave the way for the venture capitalists, investment bankers, foreign speculators, vulture funds and chancers, to slip in behind us, and stealthily take over all that lovely lucrative business that small traditional hosts have worked tirelessly to build up over the past decade. It's happening already, on an epic scale. And we're all too d*mn blind to see it. Or maybe just too dumb to care.
