@Aj87 @Alexandra316
"When the interview and story came out, I was surprised to learn that not only did Airbnb know this host was fraudulent and restricted him from booking new people but that they hadn't canceled the existing bookings - which really ticked me off since I had battled with them over the phone for two hours just to get my money back when they knew the whole time that this user was a fraud"
I've written extensively on this thread, and others, on how I've been tracing and documenting exactly these types of scams - and the "hosts" behind them - for several years now. When I first stumbled across them, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what the story was, or how some "hosts" were getting away with flooding their own listings with 5 star reviews, from a plethora of bogus profiles. After all, we were left in no doubt whatsoever that members could only have one single account, and anyone caught breaking that rule, would be ejected from the platform, pronto. Of course, that was before I started studying the T&Cs, and realised that for every rule and regulation Airbnb states, they also have an "unless authorised by Airbnb" caveat to negate it, depending on their whims. It was only then that I discovered there's actually a very pronounced tiered heirarchy system in operation on the platform, with a certain subset of members being treated infinitely better and more fairly than their counterparts. One rule for one, one rule for the other.
To be honest, I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing at first, but the more I looked, the more I saw. And the more I saw, and the longer I followed the profiles, the more patterns, similarities and "coincidences" I started to discover. Again, I'm very restricted in what I can post here, but I will say that the vast majority of hosts who were engaging in these shady practices, typically fit a certain demographic - young millenials (mostly male, some barely out of their teens), usually tech-bro types with outsized egos and ambitions, and little or no life, business or hospitality experience - but all with an uncanny ability to amass an impressive numbers of listings, over very short periods of time.
Another thing that most of these hosts had in common, was that - perhaps unsurprisingly - they also attracted lots of seriously bad reviews, very quickly (which of course, were immediately buried under a flurry of 5 star reviews from the various bogey profiles connected with the accounts). Then I started noticing that a lot of their very worst reviews started disappearing too. Initially, I just put that down to the hosts maybe having a better way of charming the CX agents into removing reviews than the rest of us, but I did find it a bit perplexing, especially as a lot of the hosts in question seemed to somehow be retaining superhost status for much longer than expected, despite the unusually high percentage of poor reviews they were frequently receiving.
What @Aj87 discovered about ** dovetails exactly with the profile, connections and ulterior motives of almost all of the players I've encountered on the platform who are operating their Airbnb accounts in a similar manner. (Once you start pulling at the threads, it's fascinating - and horrifying - to see where they eventually lead). Suffice to say, in almost every instance, heavyweight property developers/magnates and obscenely rich investors feature prominently in the shadows of the hot-shot hosts, and some of the sugar daddies pop up again and again, in connection with several different "hosts", in several different cities/countries.
An uncommonly high number of these young, inexperienced hosts - unfathomably - go on to have spectacular success in the STR arena (despite their abysmal track records and rather obvious lack of hospitality skills and standards), clearly following in the glittering footsteps of Sonder, which was founded by a 19 year old McGill drop-out, and is one of Airbnb's most celebrated Superstar MegaHosts, now with 8600+ listings, $345 million in funding behind them and a $1 billion valuation (we won't mention anything about their previous incarnation as Flatbook, which was so bad that they had to rebrand as Sonder a couple of years ago, after which, all their shockingly bad Flatbook reviews were magically disappeared from the entire internet)
Interestingly, quite a few of the hosts that I've been observing for years, appear to have "special" connections with Airbnb, with prominent Airbnb branding on the websites of those that have them, and reviews from Airbnb employees - some quite high-up employees - often appearing on their listings. Indeed, Airbnb was even publicly recommending one of these hosts just last year (something they rarely do), at the very same time as I was observing the profiles of the two co-founders of the outfit, leaving reviews for their own Airbnb listings, time and time again. Those very hosts have since received a cool couple of mill in funding too, and have massively expanded their operation, with plans for global expansion, according to their PR efforts. And coincidentally (again), they've also recently rebranded, under a shiny new name and image, and just like Sonder, their dodgy review and reputational history has been conveniently wiped clean off the internet, and from their Airbnb profiles too. (I still have lots of "before" screenshots to refer to though, from their old account)
I'll leave y'all to draw your own conclusions
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