Airbnb's easily gamed reputation system and poor customer service allow scammers to thrive

Vice's Allie Conti got scammed by an Airbnb host who promised her a really nice place, then made up a story about its toilets being clogged and shifted her to a derelict, filthy wreck of a house. When she tried to get her money back, she discovered that Airbnb had no effective systems for following up on the kind of scam she'd encountered, so she began digging.

She discovered that her scammer had multiple identities on the service (Airbnb has long struggled with scammers, including commercial real-estate companies, pretending to be just plain folks renting out a place they weren't using at the moment, but still gives these scammers "verified identity" badges on the service), and that they had been scamming people in multiple cities across the USA, and retaliating against victims who pressed their complaints by posting false reports of their victims' having thrown wild parties, leaving the properties in a dirty and damaged state.

Through some pretty excellent sleuthing, Conti was able to identify her scammer with a pretty high degree of confidence, and she discovered that he knew all kind of tricks for laying low when his victims endangered his cushy con -- for example, he sometimes listed all his properties at $10,000/night, so they wouldn't show up on anyone's searches.

Despite her extensive investigative work, no one at Airbnb would comment on the record about the scam, and five of the six identities she connected to her scammer are still live on the site.

Even some of the positive reviews of Becky and Andrews Chicago rentals seemed odd, especially those left by other pairs of hosts.