I own an Airbnb in a town in regional South Australia. This is the very first time I have been scammed by anyone on Airbnb. I got off pretty lightly, and it will never happen again.
Recently I received a request for 2 nights accommodation from a new guest on Airbnb calling himself Richard. As always, I checked Richards profile and I noted that he had been on Airbnb only one month and had no stay history.
I also noted that there was an icon on the app which stated that Richards "Identity had been verified".
This person was a good communicator, and I though Oh well, we all have to start out from scratch at some time. Another thing which influenced my decision was that he said he was sorry for the late booking and was already enroute to the town.
I foolishly trusted this person, and sent the access details forward to him. Since he said he was having trouble with the app, I also sent him the local phone number for airbnb support.
The next day his booking still had not been confirmed, he was not communicating with me, so I thought he had probably given up. I called support and they tried to contact him but he did not answer.
Two days later, I received a call from a regular business guest telling me that she found the house in a huge mess and would have to find alternative accommodation. I attended and found that this guy Richard had stayed in my house unauthorised and not paid up.
I reported this to airbnb support who were less that sympathetic, and told me that I did not follow protocol, which I can see is correct. Fortunately there was nothing broken, and nothing stolen. I only lost about AUD$250 and had to clean up after them.
The most frustrating thing was that I could not find out the identity the persons had used. This prevented me from making a proper report to the local police. I also pleaded with airbnb support to shutdown this persons profile to prevent them scamming somebody else, but they would not.
I have reported this as widely as I could, I even went to our local newspaper to be interviewed about it. So I did everything possible to spread the word and protect other hosts from these predators.
There is no doubt in my mind, that this was a well thought out ruse. It was perpetrated by somebody with a good knowledge of the airbnb booking process and good social engineering skills.
I would be most interested to know if anybody has fallen foul of this, because it would give me some idea of how widespread it might be. I wonder, is this a new scam or perhaps they learnt it from somebody else?
The lesson I have leant from this is to never ever send the access details to your property until you have received the booking confirmation from Airbnb via the app. No matter how polite they may be, no matter what story they give you.
