Kate L.

I was recently scammed for over 1500 USD by a fraudulent posting for an apartment in London on the AIRBNB site. I share much of the blame for this as I went outside of the AIRBNB site to communicate with the prospective host. But I am not inexperienced with AIRBNB, nor do I consider myself uneducated when it comes to internet buying. However I felt safe with this prospective host and I feel that I felt safe communicating off-site with this host largely because of some conflicting policies and procedures that AIRBNB uses. I am concerned that AIRBNB has become successful enough to be targeted by sophisticated scam artists who mimic the AIRBNB website, language and page formatting. This included using the AIRBNB name in fraudulent email addresses and on fraudulent bank accounts. Unfortunately, at least in my experience, I don´t feel that AIRBNB is doing enough to police it´s site, and to provide a safe and trustworthy format for connecting hosts with guests. After more effort than I think appropriate in my circumstance, I finally was able to contact AIRBNB to first confirm that the reservation I thought I had made was fraudulent, and then secondly to lodge my complaint and concern over this event. The response I received in both cases expressed regret for my experience but was focused mainly on indemnifying AIRBNB from any responsibility. It is of course common in cases of fraud to blame the victim for lack of vigilance, but AIRBNB has been disturbingly uninterested in my experience, how I might have been led to feel safe with this posting, or how a multiple user might be confused by the policies of AIRBNB. At this point it is my feeling that prospective users of AIRBNB must be extremely cautious with any connections that are made through this site. Hopefully AIRBNB will place effort and resources into making their site safer for users. I have been a very happy user of their site and think that their business model is very interesting, but with their success comes the responsibility to be more proactive to protect users from site predators. It isn´t enough to claim to be a third party platform user anymore. They need to up their game when it comes to user trust and security.