Hey everyone,
It's been awhile since I was last on the community, and so forgive me for that. However, in the past couple of days, we have been dealing with a very unusual request and we're not sure how to handle it, and so I was hoping that someone here might have some good advice.
We've been hosting on Airbnb for about 5.5 years and have been Superhosts for most of that time. Since the very early days, we have had our listing set up so that only guests with previous Airbnb booking experience, good reviews from past hosts and verified identities could book with us.
Naturally, in that time, we have had some requests from guests with no prior booking experience, and except for ones who seemed like obvious scammers, we generally allowed the bookings after asking a few questions to the potential guests. After all, guests need to start somewhere, and so far, we have never had a single problem with doing that.
Two nights ago, however, we received a request from a first-time guest for a rental of over 5 weeks in late December-early January, which is low season in Portugal, where we rent. The booking would be a lucrative one if we approved it. We would probably make more from this one booking than we generally make from all bookings from November-February, as that is the lowest rental period of the year. The guest had also verified her identify on Airbnb and was very friendly in her correspondence, and she didn't sound at all like any of the scammers with no Airbnb booking history who had clearly been trying to con us in the past.
Here's the problem: seconds after this booking request came in, we received a WhatsApp message with a Singapore area code saying that "X wants to book with you on Airbnb" and with a supposed Airbnb link to click on. As we have never linked our Airbnb account to WhatsApp, this immediately struck us as odd. Then, moments later, we received an "ADA Notification" on WhatsApp with the same message, and also with a weblink to click on that had "airbnb" in the wording.
These ADA Notifications kept coming, but of course, we didn't dare click on the weblink. Rather, to maintain our Superhost status, we sent a brief message to the guest letting them know that we would get back to them, and then we called Airbnb customer support. And while the woman we spoke with was friendly enough, she wasn't particularly helpful, as she didn't seem to know what to do. So she asked us to send her the screenshots of the messages and said that someone would get back to us.
We didn't hear anything the rest of the evening (we live in Hong Kong), and when we woke up this morning, there were some headaches with customer service that I won't bore you with. Long story. However, we did receive one helpful customer support message advising us to block the WhatsApp numbers. (We had already done so.) That person also told us that we could either decline the request or let it expire, and so we chose the latter route. We also tried to report and block the account, but for whatever reason, Airbnb did not respond to this request by blocking the guest.
So, last night, we called them again, and this time we got a more helpful agent. He promised to follow up on it and helped us figure out how to unblock the dates that had been blocked after we let the booking request expire, and then he forwarded the case to another agent, who left us some very detailed messages overnight and replied to our responses right away when we texted back this morning.
Now, here's the other problem: Airbnb says that it takes them a few days to investigate a suspicious account before they can block it--and then today, that same guest put in another booking request, for the same dates and with the same amount of money. This time, she was also adding long notes explaining who they were, what they do for a living, why they want to book for so long, etc.
Fellow hosts, the notes all sound like a genuine person talking. We don't get "scammer" from reading them, and we also understand that if we approve this booking, these guests will have to tie up a very large amount of money with Airbnb, as the platform will charge them straight away.
However, we cannot get our heads around these WhatsApp messages. We have never had this happen before, and those weblinks that were in the messages were highly suspicious.
Has anyone out there ever experienced this? If so, do you have any experience-based advice that you can pass on to us--and if not, what would you do if you were in our place?
Any suggestions, advice or warnings you could give us would be very, very appreciated. Thank you all for reading through my long message.
