Katy S.

Earlier this month I was taken in by a scammer on the website of Airbnb. I found a property in Greece in early June and started querying it with the owner through Airbnb. Having never used Airbnb before I arranged the dates with the owner and emailed back and forth a few times. Somehow he got direct access to my email. Then I received an email different from the one I had used with the owner which looked like an Airbnb email address. The email included an invoice which had the Airbnb logo, dates, confirmation number, photo of the villa, what was available at the villa, including the summary of costs and any extras like a cleaner and then bank details for a bank with an Airbnb account name. The whole thing was very professional and looked like a bonafide invoice. The money was paid and when I tried to confirm something, the supposed owner stopped replying. By this stage the villa had been taken off the Airbnb website and it became clear that it was a scam as soon as we informed Airbnb. This has obviously happened more than once and Airbnb when contacted did nothing. They are very difficult to get hold of and didn't reply to most of my emails. They don't want to take any responsibility at all and there is no compensation as I had not followed their terms and conditions. Why do they not have warnings up of their procedures as you go? I have of course learnt a valuable lesson but I have also lost my graduation holiday in addition to losing Euro1,900 and airline tickets. I tried for 10 days to get a response from Airbnb and they don't seem to care that there is a sophisticated fraudster using their site to scam their customers. They even had the temerity to say when we finally got a reply that they are sorry about our experience and I quote 'we hope you'll go on to have many positive experiences on Airbnb in the future.' Seriously, why would I ever use this company again?
As Airbnb would not help I went to the bank to try and get the funds back this way. The bank eventually got through to the bank in Spain who told us that the Airbnb account we used had now been closed. The scammers obviously know what they are doing and Airbnb don't care that they have people on their site stealing from their potential customers.