Paid the $5 to verify myself for purposes of renting out an empty room in our house. There's no reliable processes for screening a tenant other than DIY verification of their documents, income, criminal record, credit or lack thereof, etc. The website does not assist with this in any meaningful way.
We ended up renting an empty room w closet to a local 20 yr old female who agreed to pay $500/m, follow house rules, etc. said she had a small dog that was quiet, didn't chew stuff, etc. was clean. ALL LIES. First day in weird mutt had mange, a foul gland odor problem, chewed up my wife's $100 ear buds and then screamed like a human baby being tortured whenever her owner was gone. Neighbors nextdoor called animal control on us because of her. Eventually she was forced to send the mutt away cause she couldn't even afford shots at the vet due being terminated from her job (security breach, theft?) 3 days after moving in. More follows...
While she was unemployed me and wife fed her out of our pantry, helped her get a free bed, even got her a new job, and then not only did she never finished paying for the 1st month in full but simply refused to pay anything else going forward into the 2nd month up to the time she left. She kept testing our limits by bringing different men up to the house to drink alcohol (underage) and smoke weed, tried to have parties on our driveway, etc. all in breach of lease up to the point she suddenly left overnight with $550 in unpaid dues for allotted dwelling time on the very last day she was supposed to pay or else. We had already given her 3 weeks grace period and she wanted us to wait a whole other month while she already displayed a willful intent not to pay. Later we found out that this girl had mentally convinced herself that our other roommate (who has nothing to do with her, financially) already 'paid me' enough money and that basically I didn't 'deserve a $1000/m from the both of them combined' and that furthermore she 'deserved' to stay here for free cause she had 'befriended' or socially engineered my wife and the other roommate into somehow weaseling herself into that position... all this literally true in her mind as asinine and ridiculous as it sounds.
The day that girl came back to pick up the rest of her stuff (kept the room filthy, stuff like stale food and used menstrual pads just shoved underneath her bed found when we cleaned it out) my wife and our other roommate were ready to put hands on her. I'm just glad she's gone for good and won't further damage our household. Our only recourse was to submit her debt to collections cause otherwise it's not even worth our time trying to take her to small claims court.
Lesson learned. I may never use roomies again. It's literally a place (other than Craigslist) for the lowest tier of renters who probably wouldn't qualify to rent a week to week trailer on their own, let alone an apartment nor a house, so they're there looking for someone naive enough to let them in so they can ruin them.