Airbnb Scammers Are Getting Smarter (Stay Protected)

Airbnb scammers are getting well scammier I guess you could say. They are on the rise and they don't just impact hosts, they're impacting guests as well. And so in this episode I'm about to show you seven STR scams that are affecting hosts all of the time and unfortunately people are losing thousands of dollars. We've got real stories, real lessons, and also a guide to help you scamroof your stays. Stay tuned and welcome back to the Short-Term Runnes podcast. The first scam, and this one is a

classic. Classic in the sense that it's been happening for years and years, and it happened to my team and I. This is the Craigslist copycat scam, where they will literally copy your listing and post it for rent at a way lower price and then try to get payment through PayPal or even through a check, which was the case that we had. You get someone showing up at your door that is not happy. And so, of course, this isn't a good situation for anyone and we do

need to be on the lookout for copycat listings. The second is the Booking.com payment loophole. So, if your property is listed on Booking.com, which I hope that it is because you can get a lot of reservations on there, you need to make sure that you're listed properly. I've got some actionable tips for you in just a few minutes. But what happens is someone's going to book your property on Booking.com. It's going to be last minute. You're going to send them check-in instructions because most of you

have it set up to go out automatically even if the payment fails. And that's where the issue happens. These Booking.com reservations come in last minute. You send out the check-in information, they check into your property, and you find out shortly after that the payment that they process actually failed. Number three, this is the chargeback fraud. And this one's really frustrating because you can have people stay at your property, you're communicating with them, they're having a great time, and then for whatever reason after they check out,

they file a dispute likely because they know they may have the potential to win the dispute with the credit card company where they say they didn't stay at your property and they get all of their money back. These chargebacks happen when you are taking reservations through your own payment system. So most commonly Stripe and this could be reservations that come in from VBO, from Booking.com, from Google, from your directbooking website. If you are taking credit card payments, well then there is the potential for this scam.

The next one is a stolen credit card. So again, if you're taking payments, you've got to do some verification because if someone's making a reservation with someone else's credit card and they stay there, when the person actually owns the credit card sees these charges, well, they're going to file a claim with the credit card company and the credit card company is almost always going to favor with their client. In this case, they absolutely should, right? Because it's a stolen credit card. The challenging thing with these

chargebacks is that they're not necessarily going to happen the day after someone checks out or the week after someone checks out, but you could see this showing up weeks after the actual reservation. The fifth scam, the linen and pest scam, where someone will actually show up with dirty linens and use that as evidence to give to Airbnb. Now, we know sometimes these are hard to fight. If it's a pest one, you see someone send a picture and it's got this tiny little spider. A lot of

times the OTAAS are siding with their guests unfortunately. Again, I've got some tips to help you combat all this. Number six is related but a little bit different where someone shows up and within 1 to two hours they're like, "Hey, this place is dirty and they want a full refund." And what we found out is a lot of times when this happens, people are actually using the property. So maybe there's a big event going on there, maybe Taylor Swift's showing up or a sporting event, and

people are traveling in and they want a place to freshen up, maybe have some drinks or something before they head to the event. So they're actually using the properties for a couple hours and then claiming that it wasn't clean, trying to get a refund. Now, we've of course found this out through experience, right? So when someone's used one of the apartments and then our housekeepers go in where the guests said they want to check out immediately because it wasn't clean, we can see that they used

the towels. We can see that they use the shower. Well, hopefully these haven't happened to you, but at some point or another, some scammy things are going to happen. Now, I saved the craziest one for last. Number seven, these are third-party squatters. Let's say someone books your property, but they actually give access to someone else. It could be a family member, could be a friend, it could be that they're basically subleasasing your property after taking that reservation. Maybe they don't have host profile that they actually

care about and so this was an opportunity for them to get a little bit of money and just leave the scene. Again, some of these happen more on certain channels than other. I had a friend call me not too long ago with this actual one happening. He said, "Tim, there's all these people in my property. The reservation was from Booking.com. I can't get in touch with them and the people staying there like don't even know the person that made the reservation." So, of course, we don't

want this to happen. This is probably the most stressful one, right? Good news is there are quite a few ways to avoid all of these situations. Let's go ahead and get into those. The first and most obvious and easiest one is just to review your guests profile and their history. If they have zero reviews and they made a lastminute booking before some crazy concert, well, you have a little more reason to be alarmed. But that doesn't mean you want to be excluding firsttime guests. In fact,

we did a whole episode on this. This was episode 291 where we talked about all the reasons where you do want to be accepting firsttime guests. But of course, you want to have these checks in place that we're going to break down right now. The second thing you can do if you're getting risky reservations on booking sites like OTAA or even a direct booking to not allow same day check-in. So to have a little bit of buffer time to allow yourself to verify their ID, to

get a rental agreement signed, to make sure you have a deposit. These are all proactive things we can do. And I know speaking from experience, we've managed tens of thousands of guests. The times that we have these scams pop up, it's so so small, but when it does pop up, it can be stressful, right? So, making sure that you have these checks in place is going to make the whole operation a lot easier, a lot smoother. We always like to have a rental agreement digitally signed.

And so, we get this before a guest checks in. It also states the rules, so the house rules for our property. Again, you want to make sure that those are really well dialed in. And if if you don't have your house rules dialed in yet, well, you can get our free copy. The link will be in the show notes. If you're getting a booking outside of Airbnb, make sure you have a copy of their ID and also get a selfie. Just because you have a picture

of their ID and you have the name on their credit card doesn't mean they are the person in that ID. So, we take it one step further. We get a selfie so that we can match that up and we ask for that at the time of booking. And of course, all this happens before check-in. Deposits go a really long way. So, you either want to make sure you have a deposit or you have a deposit waiver set up. We use a company called WEO. Make sure

you have exterior cameras. This is such an easy one to do. Make sure that your entrance door has one not showing anything on the inside, but on the exterior, so you can see if the two guests on the reservation are showing up with an extra five guests or if they're showing up with pets. That's a really easy one to do. and so is having a digital lock code that changes with each and every guest. Don't use a static code because someone can easily give that away

to someone else. You may decide to take it one step further and actually use a software specifically for guest verification. There's quite a few out there. There's Superhog. There's another one called Authenticate where they can do a lot of this pre-screening for you. And of course, the more steps you have up front, the more likely a scammer is going to get intimidated. he's going to know that you know what you're doing, you've heard of these scams before and you've taken the proper precautions. Lastly, make sure

that you document everything. So, if there's any sort of issues going on, we like to have all written communication. That way, we can easily pass it back to Airbnb or any of the listing sites where the reservations were made. It's a clear story of everything that happened. And a couple quick tips for you guests out there. Well, if you've already been scammed, then fortunately, you've probably learned your lesson. But don't be booking things off site, right? These Craigslist scams are too good to be true. If

you're booking a property that has no reviews, take a look at the host profile. Ask a few questions to make sure that you're better prepared before you book that property. Cuz this happens on both sides, right? We are in the hospitality industry, but the reality is there's millions and millions of short-term rentals out there. A lot of people are doing a really great job. They're very honest, but there are some scammers out there. I hope this gave you a little bit more insight. Until next time,

I hope you have a fabulous week.