Looking for a scammer I fell victim to in Chicago, I discovered how easy it is for users of a short-term rental rental platform to fall for the bait
Translation of an article by Ellie Conti , a journalist who previously worked in Vice magazine
The bell rang about 10 minutes before we planned to move into the apartment found on Airbnb. I was sitting in the pub, located just around the corner from the rented apartment on North Wood Street in Chicago, when the caller said that the planned entry would not take place. He explained that the previous guest had flushed something wrong in the toilet, and flooded the whole apartment. He apologized, and promised to place us in his other apartment, until he calls the plumber.
My two friends and I flew to this city in the hope of relaxing on the tail of the outgoing summer. We bought tickets to go to the September Riot Fest music festival, where Blink-182 and Taking Back Sunday were to perform. But the journey did not come before this call. About a month before, the first owner of the Airbnb apartment had already canceled our reservation, and we had little time to replace. Trying to find something else, I found an apartment put up by a couple, Becky and Andrew. Yes, in the photographs the house looked simple but pretty enough, especially considering the running out of time - it was filled with light, spacious, and was located close to the blue subway line.
And now we had to survive the second potential disaster in 30 days, and I could not get rid of suspicions about the man on the wire who called me from the number with the area code of Los Angeles. I hoped to speak with him personally and asked if he was nearby. He said that he is now at work and he does not have time to talk. Then he said that I need to decide immediately whether I want to change my reservation.
It was as though he heard thoughts in my head tossing about whether it would be easier to find a hotel nearby, and added something else to convince me.
“The house is about three times bigger, and that's good news.”
And the bad news that he didn’t talk about was that I inadvertently stumbled upon a nationwide fraud spanning eight cities and 100 ads - unsolved fraud created by one person or organization that figured out how easy it is to cash in on poorly thought-out rules Airbnb, and make thousands of dollars on fake ads, fake reviews, and sometimes bullying. Given the listlessly forcing the site to comply with its own rules, who can blame scammers for deciding to take advantage of the new world of short-term rentals? They had every reason to believe that they would go unpunished.
This is how Becky and Andrew advertised their house where I spent two nights
The photos looked pretty good on my phone, and again I reluctantly accepted the offer at the last minute. I had only one condition - for the owner to draw up in writing what we agreed to with a vote: that I would move to the house I originally selected as soon as possible or get half the cost of rent back if the sewage problem could not be solved. He agreed, and I agreed to change the rental through the Airbnb chat application.
We scored a new address at Uber and drove off, but when we arrived at our destination, we noticed something strange: the address we were given did not exist. Walking along North Kenmore Avenue, we found a guesthouse, hidden in an alley, with a combination lock on the door. Inside, we saw something that looked more like a rooming house than someone else’s house. It was large enough, three-story, but everything else did not look as it should. A single bottle of soy sauce was stored in the pantry. The couch did not look at all like in the ad. The bedrooms were crammed with a bunch of oddly arranged beds. The place was dirty enough, and a hole was punched in the wall. The only decorations were a huge wooden cross and several paintings with views of Chicago. The barstools from the overstock site in the dining room looked as if they would turn to dust if they were seated.
It was already afternoon. The first day of vacation was almost lost, and I decided to leave everything as it is. The next day we received a message from a man who said that it was not possible to sort out the sewers in the first house, and that new tenants should call in our overnight stay the next day. We did not know what to do, and booked a hotel room, deciding to deal with the refund later.
The last message I received via Airbnb from Becky and Andrew was very strange - they asked me to leave a five-star review because “Airbnb changed their algorithm”, and so I went on to write about all the problems privately.
“With respect, I ask you to inform me of all the problems you encountered with my real estate in this message thread, and not to do a 4-star review,” they wrote.
When I asked questions about the refund, they disappeared, and I had to contact Airbnb. Although I moved to a rooming house, and then I had to urgently move out of there, Becky and Andrew returned to me only $ 399 out of $ 1221,20, and only after I got different Airbnb managers for several days. The $ 399 did not even include the service charge Airbnb took from me for the pleasure of being thrown out onto the street. However, my capabilities were modest compared to the capabilities of a company with a capitalization of $ 35 billion , and I decided that I could not do anything else.
I was glad that at the last minute I had made an agreement in writing, but I wondered what really happened in Chicago. I could not get rid of the feeling that it was not just a very poor owner of the room, and began to look for signs of unfair play that I might have missed earlier. And it did not take much time. Firstly, the owner called me through Google Voice , and this number cannot be tracked. Through a search for images, I found an image from the profile of Becky and Andrew - it turned out to be a stock photo from the site where desktop wallpapers on the topic of surfing are placed. And when I began to delve into other people's reviews on the premises owned by Becky and Andrew, I noticed several situations that were strangely similar to mine. The woman wrote that she had to change her route three minutes before the proposed placement due to alleged problems with the sewer system. The man wrote that he was promised a refund in connection with the fact that his apartment was "wrecked," but nothing was done.
Photo from Becky and Andrew's account found on the Internet
Even some positive reviews for their rented apartments in Chicago seemed strange, especially those that were left by other pairs of hosts. For example, Kelsey and Gene said that Becky and Andrew were "wonderful and sociable guests." However, they themselves are in Chicago , where they have a couple of their premises. Why would they need to rent a home somewhere else? Even stranger, a picture of Kelsey and Gene was also taken from a travel site , and how they described their premises (“Westloop 6 Bed Getaway - Walk the City”) is very similar to how Becky and Andrew did ( “6 Bed Downtown / Wicker Park / Walk the City”). Quickly enough, I was also able to find a room that looked terribly similar to the apartment that I had originally booked with Becky and Andrew, only already in my account with Kelsey and Jean . There was no mistake - the same couch, coffee table, dining room furniture and paintings on the walls.
I wondered if these Becky and Andrews and Kelsey and Gene exist at all.
I also wanted to know if these two couples had the same apartment as the other three couples that I found, or whether they had the same window decoration and the same furniture, arranged in different ways. Chris and Becky's apartments looked the same, except for the coffee table. Alex and Brittany had an extra chair in the living room. Rachel and Pete had the most differences, but still their apartment was suspiciously similar to the others. And when I looked up the address of the apartment I had booked with Becky and Andrew in Google Street View, it seemed to me that I was going crazy. There were no floor-to-ceiling windows in the photographs of Becky and Andrew's apartment, but the building, whose photo was on Google Street View, obviously had them.
All this looked as if a person or a group of persons created several fake accounts and organized a large fraud based on Airbnb. If so, then these people, who managed the five accounts I found, controlled at least 94 apartments in eight different cities. How many people have lost their money just like me? It seemed to me that I found myself in some sort of nightmare, and I sent a message to Airbnb with a warning about something that looked like a complex fraudulent enterprise.
However, Airbnb, which plans to enter the exchange next year, did not show much interest in ridding its platform of dirt. Having never received a response from the company in a few days, and seeing that the suspicious accounts had not gone away, I decided to find out on my own who exactly ruined my vacation.
I wanted to find out who owns the house we ended up staying in, but I didn’t know much on the cadastral website except that the company that owned the house was connected with lawyers from Chicago and New York. I decided that I needed to find the addresses of other real estate in order to understand who owns it, and for this I need to find other people who left negative reviews about Becky and Andrew.
The first I got in touch with was Jane Patterson from Michigan. She called me back almost immediately and told me that she had faced fraud on the part of Becky and Andrew in the same year, and could not forget about it since then.
She did not have much experience with Airbnb when she and her daughter decided to reserve housing in Marina del Rey in California this spring. However, she believed that, as a criminal lawyer, she could recognize dishonesty.
Patterson also called just before the race, and everything went almost identically to what happened to me. The caller said that the sewerage did not work in the apartment, but he managed to find a much larger place at the time until the plumber resolved the problem. This was inconvenient, but judging by the description, they were invited to live in a mansion in one of the most exclusive places in the state.
“And we decided - what the hell is this all the same to Malibu? - Patterson recalls. “We looked at the photo and decided that it would be a great deal.”
But, having arrived at the place, they realized that they were mistaken. The front door was generally open, which somewhat frightened Patterson. The house was dirty and was littered with furniture that looked like it had been picked up on the street. The couches were torn off , the chairs were burned with cigarettes , and the tables were pokots . All this can be seen in the photographs she took.
Patterson said she left a message on Becky and Andrew's contact number saying that she would not stop at such a place. And although the person who answered the call said that they would contact her about the problems she described, no one contacted her. By coincidence, one of her friends lived near this place, with whom they were able to stay, and she almost immediately launched the process at the request of a refund. She believed that her profession would give her a serious advantage in the matter of return.
Airbnb's return policy is based on complex rules . It does not state that guests require written confirmation in order to receive a refund, but it is indicated that the company has the “last word in all disputes”. It is easy to imagine how a fraudster can take advantage of such rules. If a guest, for example, stays in rental housing for at least one night, then according to the rules of the service it will be very difficult to demand a refund. If the landlord offers the guest to stay in an apartment different from the one they booked, Airbnb advises the guests to request a cancellation if they “do not like the change”. In both cases, the rules are on the side of the fraudster and housing, which he imposes on guests who have just arrived in an unfamiliar place with luggage, and who have no opportunity to spend the night somewhere else.
Patterson said that a company spokeswoman, after examining her photographs, told her that Becky and Andrew had the right to respond to the complaint. A few days later, Airbnb offered her a partial refund. Many people would simply be reluctant to leave, having received at least some money and not wanting to fight for them for a long time. After all, Airbnb has a rating system in which both hosts and guests leave public reviews about each other, and on the basis of which they can prove their reliability in the future. Therefore, the system encourages the avoidance of confrontation, which explains why Airbnb hosts constantly receive higher ratings than hotels on TripAdvisor, according to a study conducted by the University of Boston and the University of Southern California. If a customer has a negative experience with Airbnb, he’d better just forget it than leave a negative review. Otherwise, it may seem too demanding to other owners, or even get a bad review in response.
But Patterson didn't care. She knew that she was being deceived, and was not going to retreat until she got everything back to the penny. “I'm a lawyer, and I love to argue,” she said. “I just never stopped calling.”
In the end, she received her return, but with it a tough review from Becky and Andrew. “We will not invite her or recommend her to the airbnb community !!” they wrote. Patterson wondered how people without resources such as hers or alternative housing would have acted in her situation.
“You will involuntarily think about all these people who, perhaps, have saved up for six months on a five-day trip to Marina del Rey, and they have nowhere to stop,” Patterson said. “I can imagine how they lure some people into the trap of this disgusting housing.”
This is exactly what happened with Juan David Garrido, a student from St. Paul, Minnesota, who had booked an apartment with Chris and Becky in Milwaukee. Garrido came to town to go with friends to a music festival, but the hosts canceled his reservation at the last minute. But Chris, it seemed, really wanted to help him, and said that he had a place to accommodate up to seven guests. Garrido remembers that, being in a difficult situation, he was very grateful for the offer, and quickly booked a new apartment - so fast that he did not even realize its value. Because of the big company, Garrido Chris and Becky billed him $ 1800 for three nights - about half what he earned per semester.
Garrido canceled the reservation, but did not read the inscription in small print before this, because of which a penalty for cancellation of $ 950 was charged from him. He called Chris and said that he would still stay with him if he abolished the fine, and informed me that Chris agreed.
But rather quickly, Garrido realized that he would not get his money back, and Chris was not so much ready to help him, as it seemed at first. “The room was non-residential,” he told me. There were only beds. ”
Garrido tried to return the money through Airbnb support for more than a week (he showed me his correspondence). Due to the problems suffered, the company representative returned to Garrido about $ 700 of the $ 1,800 he spent on housing, but explained that the couple has the right to retain a penalty for cancellation, since Garrido did not receive written consent to cancel this fine.
29-year-old Maria Lasota was even less fortunate.
During a trip from Milwaukee to Chicago to celebrate her mother's 60-year-olds in July, she also booked accommodation with Chris and Becky. In a telephone conversation with me, she recalled how a man who identified himself as Chris called her just before check-in and said that they accidentally rented the property to two clients at once. He proposed to relocate her company to a larger housing, located directly on the same street. Lasota thought she had no choice. It was a busy weekend, in the city of Chicago Cubs played with Milwaukee Brewers, and also hosted the annual music festival Summerfest.
Like other similar dwellings, the apartment where Lasota was settled turned out to be sloppy. It was covered with sawdust, there were no simple devices such as a corkscrew to open a bottle of wine, which they brought with them to celebrate this event. “It was clear that the apartments were furnished purely for photographs,” she said. The king-size bed was equipped only with decorative pillows and a stretched sheet. The gas stove was not connected. There was no air conditioning, and the windows could not be opened due to the lack of blinds. There were no curtains, so any pedestrian could see everything that was happening inside. However, they had nowhere else to go, so they still remained.
In a local bar, she met people who mentioned that they also rented their homes through Airbnb and live in the same house. “It turned out that the same thing happened to them,” said Lasota. “At first they had to stay in our apartment, but the builders still worked there, so they were moved to an apartment higher, but it was smaller and all members of their group could not stay there.”
“And they got a call 10 minutes before arrival,” she added.
The following week, Lasote phoned with gratitude that she was such a good guest.The man at the other end introduced himself as Chris, but according to her, it was clearly not the one she had spoken to before. After Lasota began to describe the problems with the apartments, the man said that he did not understand anything, and should call his wife.
“And I said - to my wife, or to the wife of another guy? - said Lasota. “Because the one who called me last week introduced himself as Chris, but you and he have completely different voices and accents.”
Then the man hung up, and then did not call her again. Soon, however, Chris and Becky left a review on her, complaining that she had left a bunch of bottles around the house and harassed people. “They tried to prove that I threw a wild party there,” said Lasota. “But I lived there with four 60-year-old women.” She was upset andI tried to complain about this couple to Airbnb support. The manager told her over the phone that she would receive a response from the company within eight weeks. But it was August 1, and since then no information has been received.
What I saw on the Internet confirms the history of Lasoth. When people wrote bad reviews about Becky and Andrew in the past, they themselves began to claim that these guests were scammers or inexperienced travelers.
However, there was something else that attracted me to the story of Lasota. The fact that the owners were able to relocate the Lasota family and a group of people from a bar within the same building could mean that they owned the whole building, which would increase the chances that the name of the fraudster is in the records available to everyone. After looking for the address of this house, I found the name of another commercial limited liability company, and looked for it on the website of the Wisconsin Department of Finance. There you can find the name of a registered agent or person who handles company documents. Usually there is the name of a lawyer who is not required to disclose the names of clients to reporters calling him on the phone.
However, this time the profile found did not belong to a lawyer, but to a certain individual named Shray Goel.
When I looked for Goel on LinkedIn, I found that he works in Los Angeles and writes that I am the director of a “large-scale real estate rental company” called Abbot Pacific LLC. Sean Rajah was engaged in business with him, as was written on his LinkedIn page . On YouTube-channel Goel were posted video from a tour of the dilapidated apartment, including an apartment at the same address where Garrido and stayed Lasota. On his Instagram page, he described himselfas a "real estate investor at a distance", working in "Los Angeles, Chicago, Nashville, Austin, Dallas, Milwaukee, Indiana and Orlando." Eight of these cities intersect with a list of apartments associated with Becky and Andrew and other accounts. On Rahaji's Instagram, there were photos of apartments that Kelsey and Gene advertise on Airbnb. Raheja did not answer calls, letters or messages on Twitter.
After reviewing the old reviews of this couple again, I found something that I had not noticed before. In 2012, one man wrote a review on Kelsey and Gene's page, but named this pair by one name: Shrey.
“Shreya is a pleasure to host,” the man wrote in a review from 2012. “Ready to take it again anytime!” He is neat and independent. ”
Here it is.I was sure that I found a scammer.
I really wanted to get information from Goel, and I repeatedly tried to get through to him, but to no avail. I decided to call Abbot Pacific. Only the Google Voice number was indicated on the company's website, which I called several times in October, and then left a message explaining that I need to talk with Goel. The next day I sent him an email in my personal mailbox. In less than two hours, someone finally called me back, but this man claimed that he was not the one I was looking for. He stated that his name was Patrick.
He said: "I process incoming calls for Abbot Pacific."
Patrick told me that the company was bought from Goel nine months ago. Then he bombarded me with questions about my article. "I googled you, and you, apparently, like to write any kind of negative, and I want to understand how I can help." He asked me about my motivation and asked for the names of the people I spoke with. I replied that I would like to talk with Goel, and he said that he would try to connect me with him, but this did not happen.
Abbot Pacific website stopped working a few minutes after my conversation with a man
About half an hour after the call, I tried again to access the Abbot Pacific website. However, he disappeared, and in his place there was only a page with the inscription Caps: "THIS SITE IS NOW AVAILABLE." I called Patrick back to find out what was going on. “In my opinion, they turned him off yesterday,” he said. “We are adding new information to it, new real estate and more.”
When I said that I had visited the site shortly before our first conversation, and that it seemed strange to me that the site had suddenly disappeared right after, he agreed that it was “strange”.
I asked Patrick what he did before I became Abbot Pacific's secretary, and he said he was a property manager. I asked if he had a LinkedIn account, and he said he did, but he didn’t want to give me his last name. I could not find Patrick working at Abbot Pacific. I also offered to send him an email with links to the Airbnb accounts that I mentioned, but he never gave me his email, saying that he had a pen on his hand and he could write them down - and that’s it, probably the first time in the history of mankind. I told him about the polls that I had already done.
And then I added something else. “Ah, and I still have to talk about what happened to me,” I said. A few seconds of silence later, Patrick replied: "Now everything is becoming clearer."
Patrick said that Abbot Pacific has no premises on the street where Garrido and Lasota lived, however, he noted that he was not particularly connected with the cooperation between the company and Airbnb, and that this business was “blown away”. “Let me make some calls and find out where the information got lost,” he said.
Hanging up, I sent messages to the CIB account and asked Goel to call me about the article I was writing. It was 3 a.m. New York time.
“Hi, Ellie - I think you're wrong,” they wrote to me after four hours. “Maybe you need to reserve a house?”
Six hours after that, the cost of several roomsowned by CIB rose to $ 10,000 per night - this is too much for anyone looking for a short-term rental at a reasonable cost.
It has been several weeks, but the Abbot Pacific site has not risen. The man who called himself Patrick never called me back and did not connect me with Goel, as promised. Again I wrote an email to Goel and called him. I sent him messages, wrote via Facebook, as well as on the forum for real estate investors BiggerPockets, but I did not wait for an answer. But it seems that he knows that I want to talk to him. The day after talking with Patrick, all references to Abbot Pacific completely disappeared from Goel's LinkedIn page.
It turned out that I accidentally stumbled upon a larger and more detailed version of what a Los Angeles-based public defense organization discovered several years ago as part of an Airbnb study. In 2015, the Los Angeles Alliance for the New Economy (LAANE) published a report which indicated that large rental companies in LA started making money on Airbnb, creating pseudonyms under the cover of which they pretended to be ordinary homeowners. The most active company among them was Globe Homes and Condos, tagged by the alliance as ghc. This company has already closed , but previously it worked on the service under the pseudonyms “Daniel and Lexi”.
Terms of use Airbnb claimthat the owners should not give “inaccurate information”, but Airbnb does not very carefully monitor their compliance, as stated in the report. “Despite the fact that Daniel and Lexi have a verified identity card on the page, we can’t find out how they are associated with this property, except through photographs,” the report says. “This case also undermines one of the cornerstones of the Airbnb business model, namely that their rating and identification system is a reliable way to verify hosts for service customers.”
James Elmendorf, principal policy analyst at LAANE, informed me that the weak verification process at Airbnb has created opportunities for all people who want to abuse the platform by creating fake accounts.
“Airbnb does not do such checks at all,” Elmendorf said. “This is one of the most complex companies in the world, and you want to tell me that they cannot come up with a system to prevent such cases?” Airbnb simply disowns, like other tech companies, saying: "It's not in our power." If they wanted to solve this problem, they would have come up with something. ”
The problem goes beyond my fraudster and beyond Los Angeles. The Better Business Bureau has received some 200 complaints about Airbnb through its “fraud tracking” form over the past three years, and about half of them related to fake accounts, as Bureau spokeswoman Catherine Hutt told me. Using fake accounts doesn't always turn into a bad user experience. Many people don't care whose house they stayed in - they just need something cheaper than a hotel. But allowing owners to work under false names without problems, Airbnb spawned a system that allowed scammers to flourish.
Deciding that I had gathered all the evidence I needed to convince Airbnb, I sent a long message to the company’s press service, in particular asking them how they can guarantee the accuracy of the people in their accounts and how support staff should deal with fraud charges.
A little less than a day later, the company answered me the following:
Behavior with the aim of cheating, for example, replacing one offer with another, violates our community standards. We remove these offers from the site during the investigation.
And that’s it.None of the company representatives have ever agreed to talk about any details of the scheme I have disclosed. No one answered my questions about the verification process of the hosts. Regarding the obligations of the company to people who have been victims of fraud, the company only said that it “provides round-the-clock support in order to change the reservation, as well as a full and partial refund” in cases of fraud or misunderstanding. Airbnb may not have been able to describe the data validation process in more detail since it does not. I asked them questions about three accounts - Annie and Chase, Becky and Andrew, and CIB. Annie and Chase’s account was deleted, and the other two already have no offers, because of which, due to the specifics of the messaging system in Airbnb, I can not send them questions. From six other accounts,that I linked to this pattern, five are still working. Only Kelsey and Gene disappeared from the site.
Even if the plans of my scammers were a little upset, there is no guarantee that they can’t just start working from scratch. The system is still running. Airbnb has created a network of 7 million offers based on trust, which is easy to abuse if desired. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the company would rather mimic violent fraud elimination activities than answer simple questions about the verification process. Airbnb makes money on every person who does not receive compensation.
Kellen Zale, a professor at the University of Houston who studies real estate and short-term rental law, told me that not a single state or federal politician made such a fuss about Airbnb. All this falls on the shoulders of local officials, some of whom are too limited in funds to wage a real fight.
In 2015, Airbnb spent at least $ 8 million lobbying for the repeal of the law in San Francisco , which obliged the company to start a long registration process for each proposal. The law passed anyway, as a result of which the number of housing offered fell sharply. But not all cities have the budgetary resources of San Francisco. When New Orleans updated its lawsOn short-term leases in August, the underfunded city simply left the enforcement issues in Airbnb's hands.
And we all have to deal with the consequences. Zale also had a not-so-good experience with Airbnb a few years ago. Her landlord gave her the wrong code to open the door to the apartment she rented in Texas, and she had to book a room in an expensive hotel at the last minute. She said that although Airbnb did not compensate for the cost of the hotel room, she did not leave this platform. She likes the “benefits of being able to live a couple of nights like a local.”
Other people I talked to also have similar cognitive dissonance. They know that they are acting at random using startups for short-term leases, but they have no other choice. Patterson said she might switch to using Vrbo , but Lasota is still trying to get her to write a review about her out of revenge. Garrido said he also remains loyal to Airbnb.
“If I had a choice, I would not use Airbnb anymore,” he told me. “I was very upset about this fraud.” But so far I understand that if I want to travel, then I have no other options. "
, , Airbnb , , , . Airbnb, , , .
.