How to build an Airbnb Business: How you know you’re getting scammed (Airbnb thieves)
It’s hard to tell at first. Something seems a little fishy but not enough to lead you to believe that someone is out to fool you. Not from the start anyway. These days there aren’t many areas of life that haven’t been infiltrated by someone or something trying to take advantage where they can and ultimately take things that don’t belong to them.
Scams happen with Airbnbs and short-term rentals as well. And there isn’t just one way they’re doing it. An important thing to take note of is that scammers are smart and always adapt.
Just recently, for example, a scam at the start of 2022 affected 587 individuals and tallied up to a whopping $2.7 million in lost money. $2.7M lost with just one fraudulent scheme!
So we need to be careful.
As scammers are getting increasingly sophisticated in their attempts to fool people around the globe and with the rise in demand for rentals, this industry is now more prone than ever to fraud.
It’s crucial that we watch out for any potential risks to avoid becoming vulnerable to scams, even to those already staying with us. This is an important topic, so this week, we’ll talk about
- Warning signs to look out for
- Most Common STR scams
- OTA ways of protecting us (and who does it the best)
- General tips for preventing scams
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P.S. I’m excited to share that we’ve just locked in our dates for our next live event in Memphis! It takes place August 19-21 (Friday-Sunday). So if you’re interested in learning the ins-and-outs to successfully acquiring your first STR or the tools you’ll need to scale your STR empire to the moon, come join us! More info here!
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Click Here to view TranscriptWelcome to short-term rental riches will discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals quick actionable items to acquire manage and scale in your portfolio I’m your host Tim Hubbard.
Welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcasts hope you’re doing really well out there I’m down here in Columbia but I’m heading off to believes tomorrow to go to real estate conference pretty excited about that it’s actually the 70 year that I will be at this conference and it’s a really good group of people so hopefully I’ll pick up some really good tips and information act bring back and share with you guys in future episodes until then I want to jump into a subject that it’s not a super exciting topic B. because it’s not a super positive topic and that is scams people are starting to try to scam people on short term rental websites or in the short term rental industry and actually this is been happening for quite awhile likely it’s not that easy for them to do it so out of that 20000 plus gas that we’ve managed it’s only happened a few times but I want to shed some light on that and give you some insights so you can keep an eye out for it make sure none of this happens to you or hopefully doesn’t happen to any of your gas cell a couple little warning signs just to get in here some things that are just Gambian general around your short term rentals if someone’s trying to make a reservation they say it’s a surprise for someone else or to gift for someone else the third party booking basically someone else trying to make a reservation for someone else that we don’t like to do too often if they have a legitimate reason and we have all the contact information the other person there making the reservation for them let that one go but they’re not finding out information that can be a little a little scare me maybe the want one of the biggest scam me things that happens is when someone tries to avoid your preferred payment method maybe they try to go out. Side of Airbnb we have had some of our listings copied someone just straight up copies are listing and if they try to get someone to rent so you know so they’re taking our list scene in their advertising it somewhere else to try to get someone to pay outside of the platform unfortunately this did happen one time we had a guest show up to one of our properties it was already booked they had the address but they didn’t have any of the checking information or anything like that that’s when we found out they told us that they paid outside or do they send someone a check or something like that they showed up unfortunately we can refund them there is no one refund them they just got scammed so make sure that they’re not city who sends checks anymore anyways right and actually I occasionally very occasionally I mean we paid dozens of contractors all the time throughout the year occasionally I would have to pay one with Jack what we have to mail from the bank and it’s it’s old school right so if you’re paying for rental in check that’s just not very common anymore someone’s asking to pay by check or something like that then that’s that’s got a red flag around it someone can hack your account if they get into your account course login hack anything we have online right I’ve had every being counts for gosh probably 10 years now mine’s never been hacked knock on wood but someone could get in there and mess with your date a little bit I wouldn’t be too concerned with that one Airbnb does have their 2 factor authentication stuff that you can use make sure that someone is logging in from somewhere you’ve never logged in before that they recognize it as spam and on that subject the OTA’s at the travel agencies they don’t want to once came in either rights they put in tons and tons of money to make sure that the reservations of we’re getting are legitimate I’ll talk about a couple of those things right after I get through this little short list another sort of scam it is kind of like a scam but if someone says they want a refund or they’re going to give you a negative review. That’s right black male right and actually you can have that removed reviewer moved if Airbnb if they do leave you a bad one and they have that right and they’re not allowed to do that so that is a little scare me and some people try to use that to their advantage but no if someone says in writing and then they’re gonna leave you batter view if you don’t refund them or give them some sort of money back that’s basically like a scam right hopefully if there was something wrong with your property you guys are working that out fairly but if someone is just straight up asking for money back and threatening a bad review that scan quick intermission I’m super excited to announce the dates for next live event live and in person in Memphis Tennessee August 19 to 20 first this is our fourth live event and they just keep getting better and better and there’s not a ton a room so I hope you can make it will go through my whole process from start to finish what I look for properties how I find them how I set them up how I manage them how I manage them remotely with my teams and how we can scale the whole operations to retake it from start to finish perhaps one of the most exciting parts we’re gonna get on tour bus and we’re going to visit some of my actual properties in action in the operation really hope you can join us you can check out tickets at rest methods.com and again it’s gonna be a live in person I’ll be flying back from Colombia August 19 through the 20 first I hope to see you there overpayments so sometimes someone might ask you to send them a refund but it’s not a refund that they actually deserve and so ordered that they’re supposed to get and so you’re managing lots of reservations you might not notice and maybe send a refund us someone that didn’t actually need once a week be careful with that another potential scam actually this one has happened to us a couple times as well mainly through the booking.com platform so I have my properties a multiple listing sites I don’t. Have them on booking.com anymore and this is actually one of the reasons because we used to get a lot of last minute bookings are very last minute booking anyway should raise a couple flags we have another episode actually on red flag reservations that’s episode one awaits if you haven’t heard that one go back and check that one out that that’s people are actually trying to reserve your property but for something that’s a little fishy so not a straight up scams but maybe they wanna use your property in a way that you wouldn’t want them to one other place it’s going to be careful is booking.com and really last minute bookings we have had some people book with a credit card only to find out the credit card got declined but our check in instructions and gone out already we send about automatically likely now they get cancel automatically got a whole bunch of systems in place to make sure that no one ‘s get into property that should have access or that has been paid but you do get a lot of last minute bookings on booking.com to get people using an invalid credit cards are stolen credit cards and showing up and trying to get access your property so be careful booking.com I think they’ve been around a long time and people figured that one out a little more another area or another potential scam that we might lumped into this group is when someone’s actually in your property and they are bringing up all kinds of things that maybe aren’t 0 percent truthful to try to get a refund maybe there’ll be placing things in your apartment taking pictures of them saying it’s dirty or something like that this one is a little harder to verify it but if you do a really good job of housekeeping and something just totally out of the blue pops up then you might have someone that’s trying to ring a few extra dollars out of use so that can happen unfortunately but again I don’t like going into it thinking that any of our guests are trying to do that but it is possible that it can happen so with all that said there are some scammy thing. Things that are happening but Airbnb in BRB they have protections in place they don’t want someone to book our properties it’s going to scam us so damned ways of verifying the reservations of course we have the review system where we can see if gas or bad we have a blacklist system where you can report gas on both VR BO and Airbnb beautiful thing about Airbnb you know is that they’re taking the payments for you in that process them up front depending on how you have the R. B. O. set up they could be doing that for you as well for use in a property management software then you have to take your own payments in which case I would highly recommend having a system in place for a failed payments you don’t send out checking instructions for a last minute check in when the gas card is invalid so we have our house rules in a reservation so there’s a lot of things a lot of things that we can do to protect ourselves from bad gas to eat maybe Adam handful scammy things happen to us so in a nutshell there’s not too many things out there just be careful someone might copy your listing one day if someone’s and try to get payment from someone outside of it some of those other things you know where third party bookings are asking for reimbursement or threatening to write a negative review those are all kind of scammy things so just be on the lookout for those but know that they’re not going to happen that often and in the end if you have some sort of booking a reservation or something that went through and you’re not super comfortable with it well you can notify booking.com or you can notify B. R. B. O. you can notify Airbnb and let them know that you don’t feel safe comfortable with the listing have a canceled make sure you don’t send out check in instructions and you will be okay I promise. So not a lot of scary things happening out there but they do exist I hope they haven’t happened to you until next time quick up so for this week take care and I will see you soon. I want to get on the fast track to financial freedom for short term rentals what all searching the properties you choir you want to make sure that you acquired the right properties I want to give you my you doctor will show you how to do just that there is no charge to my gift to you for being one of our subscribers just go to restmethods.com that’s R E S T methods.com.
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