Tips to Avoid Getting Scammed on Airbnb | Tim Hubbard

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. Hope you're doing really well out there. I'm down here in Columbia, but I'm heading off to Belize tomorrow to go to a real estate conference. Pretty excited about that. It's actually the seventh 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 I can bring back and share with you guys in future events. Episodes. Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches. We'll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals. Quick actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio. I'm your host, Tim Hubbard. Until then, I want to jump into a subject that's not a super exciting topic 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 has been happening for quite a while. Luckily, it's not that easy for them to do it. So out of the 20,000 plus guests 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, or hopefully it doesn't happen to any of your guests. So a couple little warning signs just to get in here. Some things that are just scammy in general around your short term rentals. If someone's trying to make a reservation, they say it's a surprise for someone else or it's a gift for someone else. It's a 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 they're making the reservation for, then we'll let that one go. But if it's not, if they're not providing a lot of information that can be a little, a little scammy. Maybe one of the biggest scammy things that happens is when someone tries to avoid your preferred payment method, maybe they try to go outside of Airbnb. We have had some of our listings copied. Someone just straight up copies our listing. And if they try to get someone to rent, so, you know, so they're taking our listing and they're advertising it somewhere else to try to get someone to pay outside of the platform. And unfortunately this did happen one time. We had a Guest show up to one of our properties that was already booked. They had the address, but they didn't have any of the check in information or anything like that. So when we found out, they told us that they paid outside or they sent someone a check or something like that and they showed up. Unfortunately, we couldn't refund them. There was no one to refund them. They just got scammed. So make sure that you're not sending. Who sends checks anymore anyways, right? Actually, I occasionally, very occasionally. I mean, we pay dozens of contractors all the time throughout the year, and occasionally I would have to pay one with check or where we have to mail from the bank. And it's, it's, it's old school, right? So if you're paying for rental and check, that's just not very common anymore. If 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. Of course, someone can hack anything we have online, right? I've had Airbnb accounts for, gosh, probably 10 years now. Mine's never been hacked, knock on wood. But someone could get in there and mess with your data a little bit. I wouldn't be too concerned with, with that one. Airbnb does have their two factor authentication stuff that you can use. Make sure that if someone's logging in from somewhere you've never logged in before, that they recognize it as spam. And on that subject, the, the OTAs, the travel agencies, they don't want anyone scamming either, right? So they put in tons and tons of money to make sure that the reservations that 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's not, it's. It is kind of like a scam, but if someone says they're, they want a refund or they're going to give you a negative review, that's like blackmail, right? And actually, you can have that review removed. If Airbnb, if, if they do leave you a bad one and they have that in writing, they're not allowed to do that. So that is a little scammy. And some people try to use that to their advantage. But no, if someone says in writing that they're going to leave you a bad review if you don't refund them or give them some sort of money back, that's basically, 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's a scam. Overpayments. So sometimes someone might ask you to send them a refund but it's not a refund that they actually deserve and so. Or that that they're supposed to get. And so you, if you're managing lots of reservations, you might not notice it. Maybe you send a refund to someone that didn't actually need one. So be, 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 on multiple listing sites. I don't have them on booking.com anymore. And this is actually one of the reasons for. Because we used to get a lot of last minute bookings, a very last minute booking. Anyway, should raise a couple flags. We have another episode actually on Red Flag reservations. That's episode 108. So if you haven't heard that one, go back and check that one out. That's people that are actually trying to reserve your property but for something that's a little fishy. So not a straight up scam, but maybe they want to use your property in a way that you wouldn't want them to. One other place that you're going to want 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 had gone out already. We used to send them out automatically. Luckily now they get canceled automatically. We've got a whole bunch of systems in place to make sure that no one's getting into a property that shouldn't have access or that hasn't paid. But you do get a lot of last minute bookings on booking.com you get people using invalid credit cards or stolen credit cards and showing up and trying to get access to your property. So be careful with 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 lump into this group is when someone's actually in your property and and they're bringing up all kinds of things that maybe aren't 100% truthful to try to get a refund. Maybe they are placing things in your apartment and taking pictures of them saying it's dirty or something like that. This one is a little harder to verify. But if you do a really good job at housekeeping and something just totally out of the blue pops up, then you might have someone that's trying to wring a few extra dollars out of you. 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 things that are happening, but Airbnb and vrbo, they have protections in place. They don't want someone to book our properties that's going to scam us. So they have ways of verifying the reservations. Of course, we have the review system where we can see if guests are bad. We have a blacklist system where you can report guests on both VRBO and Airbnb. Beautiful thing about Airbnb, you know, is that they're taking the payments for you and they process them up front. Depending on how you have VRBO set up, they could be doing that for you as well. If you're using 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 payment so you don't send out check in instructions for last minute check in when the guest card is invalid. So we have our house rules and our reservations. So there's a lot of things, a lot of things that we can do to protect ourselves from bad guests. So we've maybe had a 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 and if someone's. And try to get payment from someone outside of it, some of those other things, you know, or third party bookings or 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 or reservation or something that went through and you're not super comfortable with it, well, you can notify booking.com or you can notify VRBO, you can notify Airbnb and let them know that you don't feel safe, comfortable with the listing, have it canceled, make sure you don't send out checking instructions and you will be okay. I promise. So not a lot of scammy things happening out there, but they do exist. I hope they haven't happened to you until next time. Quick episode for you this week till take care and I will see you soon. If you're looking for a ton of free resources, well you can check out the links in the show notes or head to our website restmethods.com where you'll find free guides, house rules, and my ebook on finding the best short term rental properties. Thanks for tuning in.