@Mary419 Good post. There's no good reason whatsoever that Airbnb couldn't require hosts to submit either their ownership papers, or if they are a tenant or manager, permission from the owner to list. It's outrageous to me that they don't and equally outrageous that a homeowner is ignored when someone is illegally listing their property.
I dealt with something similar when my neighbors (who are also friends) left the country and rented their place out for 6 months to a couple of young women. They had several meetings with them, had them over to dinner, totally trusted them. Within 2 weeks of them leaving, it was obvious they had rented the place out, as 6 carloads of people showed up for a holiday weekend just after the girls had told the other neighbor they were going away for the week. I right away looked online, and found their Airbnb ad, although it just showed up on a Google search, they'd obviously closed the Airbnb ad as soon as they got a booking.
I called the owners, who called the girls, who claimed all those people were their "friends", which was total BS. They were told never to do that again, but they continued to do it. When I talked to the girls, telling them I had found the ad, they brushed it off, saying "Oh, that was never an active listing", which it had to have been, or it wouldn't have appeared on a Google search, and which doesn't explain why they would even make a listing draft, when they had no permission to sublet. I subsequently found out these girls do this all over town- rent out big houses, then list on Airbnb without the owners' knowledge.
BTW, you can mention the other platforms here. Airbnb CS doesn't monitor this forum, the forum moderators do, and they aren't really even Airbnb employees, they work for Standing on Giants, which contracts out moderating services. Posts really only get removed or censored for profanity, personal attacks, discriminatory comments (i.e. racist), if they are advertising spam, political rants, or have personal info like email addresses, phone numbers or embedded links.