Introduction and Phishing Inquiries Question

[Ania2135]

Hello Everyone, 

This is my first post to this community. 

I want to introduce myself and ask a question. 

I'm Ania and I currently live and host in Cascade/Green Mountain Falls area Colorado.  I've only been in Colorado for about year and a half and just listed my property with Airbnb. 

I was a Superhost when I lived  in Baltimore, Maryland in 2016 - 2018. I loved hosting.

I look forward to hosting here.

My question is regarding bogus/phishing inquiries.  Since I've listed my property,  I've had nothing but suspicious inquiries from VERIFIED members.  They usually want to book for weeks or months at a time and want to connect outside of Airbnb. 

I want to know how does this happen? If they are verified,  how are they able to make these inquiries? What is their end goal? What are they looking to gain? 

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. 

Ania

[Mike-And-Jane0]

@Ania2135 verification is a relatively simple process. As such scammers and those wishing to operate off-platform can easily be verified. They could have nefarious plans or could just want to save the Airbnb service fee.

[Nancy-Carol0]

Hi. All this off-platform  talk worries me. Obvious there is a loophole in the verification. Is anyone working to solve it?

[Huma0]

@Ania2135 

Airbnb have made a big song and dance lately about how they are going to require ALL guests to be verified before booking. However, take a look at the description of the verification process and you will see that it is fairly meaningless. 

Also, even though it's against the rules, it's very easy for guests to set up a additional profiles, e.g. if they receive a bad review on their original one. Even after I reported a guest for this (on Airbnb CS's own instruction), they allowed both profiles to allow on the platform so the guest was able to book with other hosts who had no idea about her previous terrible review. BOTH profiles show as verified...

[Pat271 · Accepted solution]

@Ania2135  Just to play Devil’s Advocate, there is a huge demand right now for mid-term rentals, typically for more than a month but less than a year. Could it be possible that those are legitimate requests, but those that don’t want to pay the huge Airbnb fees that would be associated with a long stay?

Still, you are right that these could be scammers, and even if they aren’t, they shouldn’t try to bypass Airbnb on the platform. You’d think that Airbnb would at least have some sort of algorithm that was capable of flagging such users.