Long, but very interesting read. Makes me miss the days when Vice regularly put out good content.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4...scam-on-airbnb


Cliffs:

- Author Allie Conti (longtime VICE writer) booked Airbnb in Chicago, got moved at last minute to "upgraded" unit due to supposed plumbing problem.

- Her unit was a complete dump and looked nothing like the picture. She checked out early after failing to get anything resolved.

- Property owner refused to give refund, Airbnb customer service was shit and gave only a small refund despite loads of evidence.

- Author investigated and found a ton of accounts in several cities with similar names and using similar stock pictures to advertise properties which didn't exist.

- Everyone who rented these properties got moved right before checkin to something "better", which was always a rundown dump.

- Airbnb customer service gave these fake accounts "verified" status despite being clearly phony.

- Scammer behind all of these accounts would blackmail people into giving 5-star reviews (or no reviews at all) with the threat of giving renter a bad rating. (Airbnb allows owners to rate renters, which fucks renters wanting to use Airbnb in the future if they get bad reviews.)

- Airbnb basically gave no fucks, would never issue full refunds, would never remove the retaliatory bad reviews given to renters, and would never terminate the offending scammer accounts.

- Author gathered all evidence and wrote this bombshell article.

- After seeing the article, Airbnb laughably gave the author a weird second partial refund like $241.88 with no explanation.

- FBI saw the article and decided to investigate both Airbnb and the scammers, who the author identified.


The scammers were Shray Goel and Shaun Raheja.




Goel and Raheja took down their Linkedin page and company website as soon as they realized this chick was onto them, even before the article was published.

Airbnb still hasn't deleted their accounts.

What a shady/incompetent piece of shit company. Makes me actually support the attempts by cities like San Francisco to highly regulate them. You let these tech behemoths run amok and self-regulate, this is the shit you get.