Tips on avoiding scams and fraud

[Deborah0]

As many may be aware, there are scammers and criminals who try to scam both Airbnb hosts and guests.  So you need to keep your wits about you to avoid falling prey to their scams.  I recently found an article (  This one  )that included this helpful chart, which is a good guide to hosts to be able to distinguish between emails from Airbnb vs those from criminals.  

One of the most common ways that criminals try to prey on hosts, is to lure them to "phishing sites", which are the criminals' websites, cleverly designed to look like an Airbnb log in page.  Criminals have often posted posts on the host community groups ,as one did yesterday, where they are trying to lure in naive hosts with some get-rich-quick scheme, like info on "how to be a superhost in 4 days" or some such nonsense.  THey post a link in these scam posts, which if the host clicks on the link, takes them to a phishing site, much like this one:  

One thing to notice about these phishing sites, is that the URL is not actually the Airbnb website.  THe Airbnb website will have a padlock icon in the URL, and be a secure site starting with "https://" and it will begin with www.airbnb.com, or www.airbnb.co.fr or other ending for other nations.  If you are taken to a log in page with a dubious URL, do not log in, because if you do, the criminals will steal your log in info, and then easily hack into your account.   If in doubt about the authenticity of any given website address, contact AIrbnb customer service for help about it.  (see  this post  by Dave and Deb on how to contact Airbnb customer service) These phishing sites also should be reported (Flagged) to Airbnb as soon as possible, to help avoid hosts falling prey to the criminals.  

For more information about the criminals/hackers/scammers and how they prey on both hosts and guests, see my post on this here:

Forum post about how Hackers work

[Clare0]

Good job, Deborah.  Hope everyone reads this as this is the first step on blocking scammers.   I've seen many, many scam listings who use hacked host profiles, including associated reviews!

[Martin0]

This came by email this morning, it's a scam - click on the link and you are asked to log in. Paste the link in your browser and you will get Error 404; OOOPs the site doesn't exist.

www.message.com does exist but you cannot contact them - no link!:

Airbnb ( Karsten ) <(email hidden);Today at 1:58 PM                                           

Hello Member , 

Your Guest has left you a message about his reservation, please respond as soon as possible:  

Here is the message:   https://www.airbnb.com/room/2518641 

Thank you!

Team Airbnb

The email actually comes from message (at) message (dot) com - just remove the brackets etc but under no circumstances click on the link and log in! And if Airbnb blank the details, well you will still know what not to do!"

Martin

[Michael6445]

I am getting bookings through express@airbnb.com confirming bookings at an unreasonably low night price of around £1.80 per night plus $50 cleaning.  The format of their reply seems very different.  Is this a scam?