Slashdot Mirror
SFPD Arrests Suspect In Airbnb Rental Trashing
theodp writes "Just days after it was reported that apartment sharing startup Airbnb had raised $112MM at a $1B+ valuation from investors that included Marc Andreessen and Jeff Bezos, Airbnb user EJ's blog entry on the ransacking of her apartment by Airbnb renters went viral, creating a PR nightmare that's turning into a war of words. CNET reports San Francisco police have confirmed that a 19-year-old woman has been arrested in the case, booked on possession of stolen property, methamphetamine, fraud charges, and an outstanding warrant."
Sounds like what I would expect from sharing my apartment with random strangers.
What I can't believe is not that someone would trash an apartment "just because", but that someone else wouldn't think it was possible. Have they seriously been living in cloud-cuckoo-land?
My ex-mother-in-law rented out her house to complete strangers for six months while she was on the other side of the planet. We all said she was incredibly stupid to do such a thing - not least because in that amount of time you could do ANYTHING, i.e. discover house deeds and sell the house to someone else, sublet it out to complete strangers (it was in the middle of a tourist area and used as a guest house when they were home) and there was no-one to check on what happened (she lived hundreds of miles away from where we did).
Although everything went fine, why on earth would you consider doing such a thing, especially in somewhere that's still housing your clothes, a safe with your personal documents, personal possessions, etc.? You've got to be really stupid or incredibly naive.
I bet your normal house insurance doesn't cover such events. I bet airbnb's insurance doesn't cover such events. I bet its difficult to even find rental insurance that covers you when you have no knowledge of who's renting from you.
It's a horrible thing to happen, and it *shouldn't* happen, but equally if I leave my car out in the road with a "Borrow my car for only £10 an hour" scheme where I never see who borrows my car, it's OBVIOUS that the chances are I will never see my car again or, if I do see it, I won't want to. And a car is a replaceable thing. It's not a house. It doesn't contain safes with all my identification documents (what a stupid idea to leave those, even in a safe, in a house you're renting out).
Seriously, it's a horrendous thing to have happen to you but, more seriously, you *DIDN'T* see it coming?
and this is interesting to Slashdot because?
...Slashdotters are early adopters of many new products. And everyone needs reminding now and then that just because most people are reasonable doesn't mean this particular stranger will be. (Apologies for the Latin-English mismash.)
From some quick googling, it seems that that safety FAQ was only recently made available, perhaps in response to the whole EJ incident. If you go to the Wayback Machine (http://wayback.archive.org/web) and enter that page's URL (http://www.airbnb.com/home/safety) and click 'Show All', it will tell you it doesn't have it but there are other pages. Go ahead and look at what airbnb had to offer the wayback machine and you'll see a tips page. Check that one out and you'll see some very very simple safety suggestions. Except they aren't NEARLY as protective as what this new page makes out.
Should she have done more to protect herself? Sure. Would I personally ever use airbnb? No; my trust of my fellow human doesn't go that far. But don't make it appear that at the time EJ performed her transaction on the website that airbnb had posted stringent rules about staying safe and protecting yourself.
How often do we get mugged walking down the street? It can happen, but it's so exceedingly rare that it never happens to most of us. This is not even a remotely new concept - there are tons of travel forums where people offer this kind of service from all over the world. If you read a little closer, this woman didn't take any basic precautions like getting ID, photographs, references, phone numbers and so on. Sure you could fake all of that information, but then you need accomplices.
Right you are, she is mad and surprised, though the thought of easy money for her obviously far outweighed the minimal effort she put in to get it. Hopefully the people who did it are caught, and hopefully this woman learns a very valuable life lesson.
Ooh, good catch. (I'm the A/C above, didn't notice I wasn't logged in). I have to wonder what type of info they may have posted to the logged in user at the time when they made the listings. Probably very little based on what you found. I think most of us agree she appears to have approached the whole thing without enough common sense.
I just ran across this usatoday article which had some more info (apparently the 19 year old isn't in SF PD custody anymore...).
EJ claims she hasn't gotten squat from airbnb still, airbnb is saying they have offered all sortsa compensation. Seems like an easy enough thing to verify; I don't get how it's still a he-says-she-says routine.
What was interesting in the article was this bit from airbnb:
Airbnb, while pointing out that the incident was the first of its kind out of some 2 million stays booked since the company's founding in 2008, announced that it would be doubling the size of its customer service staff (42 people at the time of the incident and 88 currently), offering insurance to hosts and creating a "Trust and Safety" department, among other measures.
That seems to imply that they do not currently offer insurance. How naive of them to not consider it necessary in the last 3 years. One of their similar competitors, roomarama.com, also doesn't provide any type of insurance.
Also from that article: /. user, that just isn't right.
She said was "growing a very thick skin" because of accusations that she was part of a plot by the hotel industry to discredit Airbnb, and because of criticism that she courted disaster by opening her rented apartment to strangers.
That's just harsh. I couldn't find who was supposedly making those accusations, but if it's more than the cynical
Here's hoping she at least gets her backup drive back.
Rose lensed glasses for everyone!
Adding "on the internet" to something turns it from a trivial happening into Slashdot-worthy material. It's the same method companies use to cancel prior art at the USPTO.
I rent a house and the landlord wanted to send round some painters to paint the windows and front door. I wasnt going to be in that day i was at work and didnt want to take a day off just for that. anyway i'm talking to the painter on the phone and he asks me to leave the house keys next door to he can open the front door and paint the frame and the whole door, thats when i my alarm bells started ringing so i said to him how about you leave me the can of paint and i'll finish the inside of the door, so he says no i cant do that. so i left it at that, i'm thinking you dont trust me with a can of paint but you want me to trust you with my house keys?
Let me get this straight. The gimmick is you rent out your place to a total stranger, you don't even meet them face-to-face, and expect them not to run away with all your phat loot ? Moronic. Hotels don't trust them anywhere near as much. They sure as shit don't leave anything of real value in closets, despite the cameras on each floor and at all exits.
What happened to EJ is truly vile, but what the fuck was she expecting ? She probably felt generous thinking 3% of Airbnb users would be vile, but she got the math wrong. Yes, 3% might be wanted criminals, but then about 90% are opportunist scum, and the remaining 7% are people like EJ with their heads in the clouds. All the locks and home insurance in the world are pointless if you're handing your keys to any stranger with a credit card.
After reading that post, I almost think she was asking for it, that it was all a set-up to show how dangerous this thing can be. Heck, I could do the same: I'll just write my door code on the lock itself, then leave for a week. By the time I return, I guarantee you there will be nothing left of my apartment, not even the fancy lock! They'll even smile at my cameras as they walk out with my used underwear.
Inventing a farcical business model, backed by a handful of dot-com profiteers is not going to change the fact that people are, by default, selfish, destructive, competitive swine until proven otherwise. People are greedy little shits, and nothing is going to change that as long as we worship possessions and wealth.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
A lot of this is reading between the lines, but if you RTFA, she didn't do any due diligence because she couldn't. Airbnb explicitly demand that all communication takes place through their website - which can make it hard to get someone's email address, phone number and references.
To a lay person, this is more-or-less how traditional letting agents work. The landlord and the tenant aren't even allowed to communicate directly until contracts are signed; either tenant and/or landlord pay the agent a fee and the agent does all the checks before this happens.
Therefore - reasonably if somewhat naively - EJ assumed that this was pretty close to a traditional letting agency - and Airbnb would have done these checks themselves. After all, they charged her a fee much like any other tenant-finding service.
Billion dollar company I have never even heard of. Who says dot-com is dead?
Billion dollar company you have never heard of that isn't making any profit (otherwise they wouldn't be asking VCs for money), that doesn't deal in anything tangible, that owns very little in the way of real assets (Office furniture typically goes for a fraction of its new value at auction; they're using outside companies to host their website and email so they probably don't have much of their own server infrastructure), that adds no real value for their customers and does something that almost anyone could replicate very quickly and cheaply.
A company that is so secure in their billion-dollar valuation that the CEO actually contacted the blogger in question and explicitly said that he was concerned about what that blog entry would do to the valuation of his company.
AFAICT, sounds like an absolutely classic dot-com disaster waiting to happen.
Since there's nothing remotely tech about this story, with the possible exception of a website existing, and the fact that they do unrelated plugs to other stories in an attempt to make this airbnb thing sound neat, I'm going to go ahead and say this is just an attempt at getting more attention/traffic their way. I'm not saying no vandalism occurred, I'm just saying that there's no part of this story that belongs on slashdot, and it's only here because it serves as a way to get them more of that SEO goodness with the google love machine.
If you read a little closer, this woman didn't take any basic precautions like getting ID, photographs, references, phone numbers and so on
That's because Airbnb explicitly denies the possibility of doing such: you do not get any kind of details, not even phone number, on the rentee. Blaming it on EJ is kind of pointless then.
Let me get this straight. The gimmick is you rent out your place to a total stranger, you don't even meet them face-to-face, and expect them not to run away with all your phat loot ? Moronic. Hotels don't trust them anywhere near as much.
Everyone is focusing on the moronity of renting to, basically, an "AC" because of THIS story. What I wonder is if the renters get to (legally) learn about the owners; are the owners ACs from the point of view of the renters?
I can see four business models where the owner is a crook:
1) House happens to burn down (arson) while renter is present so presumably the owner can not be blamed. Sucks if the renter dies in the fire; then again that makes it more "authentic".
2) House has a "big brother" style camera / videorecording infrastructure, including/especially in the bedrooms and showers. And the owner prefers to rent to attractive young people, perhaps by being on the beach or near a college campus, or maybe kids play equipment in backyard is used as a lure, etc.
3) So, someone is visiting, probably with stuff worth stealing, and someone happens to have their full itinerary, and a spare house key... Would be a shame if their laptop gets stolen... Consider a young woman and someone knows her schedule and knows she is completely alone and also has a key to her bedroom and has some bad intentions...
4) Its actually a grow op / drop house, what if the cops decide to show up that night? Is the visitor part of the gang and laundering their money, or not?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Yes, Airbnb is a service that doesn't provide any value (why do they exist, again?), but thats not the problem here. Even if they did provide verification of the renter, it would still be stupid to rent out ones apartment exposing private and personal information to some stranger. In this case, the landlord realized that her identity was at risk because the place had been comprehensively trashed. A smarter thief would have simply noted down all the personal data would letting the landlord suspect anything. And because the identity theft using this data could happen many months later, it would be difficult to pin this down to a specific renter.
There is no escaping the fact that landlords like this need a reality check. Maybe the world is filled with people who do and want to do the right thing, but why would you take a risk like this assuming that no bad apples would come in contact with you?
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Whats [sic] their patent portfolio look like?
After a quick search on the USPTO web site, there are no issued patents or published patent applications assigned to "airBNB" or "Airbed and Breakfast." Of the founding team, Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, and Joe Gebbia, there is design patent (not utility patent, mind you) D540,097, "Portable seat cushion," listing a "Joseph Gibbia" as inventor, and assigned to "Joe Gibbia." Other than that, I couldn't find any issued patents or published patent applications associated with the founding team, either.
Of course, patent applications are published 18 months after they are filed, so it's possible they have some applications in the works of which we are not aware.
LOL more like how long until they show up on Fark with a "Florida" tag, in real life
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Because it's worked in the past, in various forms, successfully for many years.
There was a group you could join in the 1970s to get your name in a directory of people who would put other people up free, in exchange for reciprocity by somebody else when they were looking for a place to stay -- sort of Craigslist before computers. Great deal if you like to travel and meet people.
That's different from going off and leaving somebody to rent your house in your absence, but there are dangers in having people as guests in your own home.
When I was in college, I was renting a house that I sublet to some physics graduate students for the summer. I had to clean the place up after they left (not malicious, just lazy), but it was worth it for three months rent.
Usually, when you sublet, you check them out. My sub-tenants were students at the same school, and I got them through the school housing office, so they couldn't disapper.
One of the problems in this case is that Airbnb actually makes it more difficult or impossible for you to check the renter out. As several astute /.'rs have pointed out, what exactly is the value-added that this company offers over Craigslist?
I'd like to see a lawyer give an opinion on what liability Airbnb has to this blogger, notwithstanding their boilerplate waivers.
When you read AirBNB's current (as of 2:40pm 7/31/2011) FAQ, it's seriously frowned-upon for a host to use the "contact information" they are given to actually make a decision to NOT rent to someone. Step 5 is accept or deny request, at which point you have no information. Step 6 is AirBNB collects the payment. Step 7 sends the real contact info. Step 8 describes when payment will be released. And that's the end of their public process.
There's no step 9 -- what to do if you are unhappy with the details you received. At the end of the FAQ we find "We take host cancellations very seriously, because they pose a huge problem to guests' travel plans and they hurt the reliability of our website. When a host cancels, their ranking in search results is negatively affected." That means AirBNB is going to penalize you, as a host, if you elect not to accept a guest based on the contact information you have received.
Seems to me that AirBNB is going to have to come up with a policy for the "early period", during which time a member is considered "new". A new member should probably have a mandatory security deposit requirement, and any such reservation request should be flagged as a new member request.
If I left my front door unlocked and nothing happened for two months, but then on around day 70, someone walked right in and robbed me, people would still say I was an idiot for it. Even if I said "but nothing happened the first 69 days!".
I would say you are statistically lucky, should count yourself fortunate, and avoid the unnecessary risk in the future (at least the "while we were out of town" part).