Troubles ahead?

[Ellen33]

hi guys,

Just to inform you about strange things.  2 days ago we received a request from kennedy. new guest, no reviews. he wrote that he wanted to stay at ours for 11 days but had some questions. he provided us with his telephone number using a way of writing that airbnb censor wouldnt detect. we accepted request in order to stay withing 24 hours accepting limit and wrote that he was more then happy to ask questions through the airbnb app.
we never heard back from him.

now we go a request from kayla. same style, same message style, same period, also providing phone number. this is odd. those 2 individuals are up to bad things? or something is wrong here and it is way to suspicious that this happened twice. Somebody had this before? What would be the scam?

[Sarah977]

@Ellen33  It seems that maybe they are persistently trying to get you to phone so as to get you to make some private deal?. I don't really have a criminal mind, so I'm not sure what other kind of scam this could be.

But I would definitely report it to Airbnb and ask them to look at the messages. One thing they don't like for sure is people trying to sneakily book outside the system (i.e. sending you their phone number by writing it out), so hopefully they'll close these accounts. And if your calendar got blocked because you accepted, make sure they unblock it for you.

[Ellen33]

Hi sarah,

I know that they wanted to deceive the system by not booking via airbnb. But for me it seems suspicious that we got a request for some dates, 1 person, same style message. Thats what i find odd

[Sarah977]

@Ellen33  I'd say they are likely either friends trying to get hosts to circumvent the system, or actually the same person who has set up more than one account (fake accounts). I'm going to venture a guess that the profiles are new and they have no reviews?

[Ellen33]

@Sarah977 

Hi,

Yes indeed. No info . New profiles. No reviews.