I just caught a guest using a fake name!

1

So, a girl just instant booked and when I read her introductory message something just clicked that said, “something’s not right with this.” Her first message to us was, “hi.im queenie im wiht my mom.I want to know the address.” She wants to know our address - just like that! And she said her name was “queenie” but her Air profile said it was “Oliviarsl” (yes, that’s an L on the end of the name)! That’s a weird name either way, I thought!

I checked out her profile and it was absolutely empty. And it said she only had two verified IDs, one facebook and the other email. So, not exactly the gold standard in ID verification!

I didn’t want to cancel on her if I didn’t have to, it was a good 2-day $200 reservation and it would have given us a 91% booking rate for September - which is just about perfect. So, I thought I’d push a little and see what I could find out. I asked her what time she would arrive and she said 9:00 a.m. So, I wrote back and said, “Our check-in time is 2:00 p.m, are you okay with that?” Normally, I would have offered to let them come by early and drop their things off. But I was just curious what she would say if I was more curt about it.

She wrote back and said, “ok thank you see u in ny”. Well, that was a weird response. A normal person would have asked if they could come by early or they would have complained and asked what did I expect them to do for the next 5 hours! So, to say ‘ok thank you, see you, no problem’ raised my suspicion level a little more.

I talked to my wife about it and showed her everything and asked what she thought and she took a look, thought about it for a few minutes and said, she didn’t think it looked good. The girl had posted some weird sexy shots… and I started thinking about all the stories I’ve heard of prostitutes booking Airbnbs.

I then found her facebook page. It said she lived in New York (which is where I am). Her Airbnb page said she lived in Seattle! Finally, after my wife and I talked about it a little more, we decided to cancel. (First time, ever). When you cancel, Air forces you to write a message to the guest explaining why. So I told her, her profile was empty and there was no legitimate verified ID.

Well, the next thing you know, she writes back practically begging us to accept her reservation! I didn’t respond. Then, she writes and asks if she can send her government ID. Again, I didn’t respond. A minute or two later another message comes in and it’s a photo of her (or somebody’s) driver’s license.

And guess what! It had a different name on it! It was similar - but different. Her Chinese last name now replaced the bizarre Oliviarsl as her first name. And her last name was now a different Chinese name. So, she was using a fake name! I’m sorry, but if you’re not giving your real last name, you’re hiding something. You may have good reasons to do so - but if we catch you doing it - you’re not gonna be staying with us! Oh, and the photo on her ID was a totally different person than the photos she had on Air! If she had just used her real photo in the first place, I probably never would have become suspicious.

And get this… a few minutes goes by and suddenly we get a new reservation for the same dates, same price, same room and… same NEW NAME of this girl! She went on Air, changed her name, submitted some real ID, or some real-looking fake ID. She also added two pictures that matched her ID picture (while keeping the two original photos which are of a totally different person). Air accepted it and said she now had 8 pieces of verified ID. And she then booked with us again under the new name! And yes, I cancelled it again. So, now thanks to this idiot, instead of having a clean record all these years with no cancellations, I now have two cancellations on my record from the same night!

But what a wacko! Who in their right mind would re-book with a host who had just cancelled them and caught them in the act of using a fake name!? And did she really think we’d accept it the second time around? NO WAY! Now even if we wanted to change our mind, we wouldn’t, because we know she’d leave us a terrible rating for all the trouble we caused her.

2 Likes
2

And by the way, does anyone know how this guest was able to send a photo attachment through the Airbnb messaging system? We can’t do that as hosts, right?

3

Clearly it was someone trying to scam you.

4

Why didn’t you just call Airbnb rather than cancelling the bookings and explain the situation, tell them you were uncomfortable and ask them to cancel the booking? then you wouldn’t have two cancellations on your record.

6 Likes
5

I second @Helsi, I would have first called Airbnb - the first time around, asked them to ascertain the validity of the user and pressed them to either get her fix it or get them to cancel it.

While the whole thing sounds rather weird, one thing I’ll point out is that Chinese people use an English/Western name in addition to their Chinese ones, so the formal documents might have the latter while in their communications they’d use the former. Still, I think this is legitimate only if the have just one E/W name alongside their native one.

Going by her multiple attempts to get booked, it looks like someone’s desperate to stay, either with salacious intent as you suspect, or who knows, wholly innocent but a stupid way of going about it.

6 Likes
6

If you reply to an email notification of a message with an image attachment, I think it goes through. Guests or hosts.

2 Likes
7

I agree @Astaire

All my Chinese guests, or those of Chinese origin living elsewhere in the Far East use a variety of names including Chinese and European ones.

@JohnYork many guests have empty profiles and don’t have English as a first language so send odd messages.

In this case it sounds highly likely there was something off with your guest, but I think you need to take some responsibility for not handling this as well as you could have.

3 Likes
8

I think you over-analyzed and perhaps mis-analyzed this. In any case perhaps cancelled too quickly. Like Helsi, I say this because of the guest being Chinese. I had a guest booked under one name and she used another name in her correspondence with me and a third name is on her personal email. She was here two nights and I spent some time with her trying to help her after she was mugged in LA. We exchanged emails and I’m supposed to contact her if I am ever in Shanghai. I still don’t know her name.

3 Likes
9

It’s possible to send attachments (of any kind, as far as I know) through the Airbnb messaging system, (as in, it works some of the time), but it’s not reliable. When I need to send attachments I ask for the guests email address and send it direct to that.

10

Pray tell, where be the button on the correspondence page that says ‘Attach’?

11

You use that obfuscated email address that you can see on the left hand side of the guests profile, and just send a normal email to that address. Though I’ve mostly stopped using it myself, even for emails without attachments. The message that goes through destroys all formatting. Try sending such a message to yourself, and you’ll see what I mean.

12

Sure that’s sort of what I meant when I replied to @JonYork above.

From your wording I understood it’s possible to send it through the web interface itself. Which I don’t think it is.

1 Like
13

Oh. If you understood that, then I apologise for the misunderstanding. And I agree; I don’t think it is. It would be easy to add that functionality, though.

1 Like
14

No need for an apology, it could have been interpreted either way.

I don’t think it’s in Airbnb’s interest to encourage people to send attachments, so I don’t think that feature will ever see the light of the day.

15

I sound like your granny reminiscing about the good old days, but it wasn’t that long ago when they just gave you the real email address. I don’t know why they had to go to a relay system. Although I have noticed that if you have some back and forth correspondence you will be able to grab the real email from the headers if you need it. Sometimes I have trouble getting a 2mb PDF attachment through the relay.

16

Agree, after reading this over again, with everyone also on JonYork’s dilemma. I think he panicked and overreacted… cancelling by you should have been a last resort. Why didn’t you call them first? They would have done it if the person was suspicious. But they obviously had the money to keep booking… ?? It’s probably in reality just someone struggling with language issues.

17

This is to avoid people being able to abuse another’s email.

I’m not sure this is possible. Essentially, Airbnb acts as an intermediary, receives your email to the obfuscated address and sends to the recipient obfuscating your address, and vice versa. The idea is to have the real emails concealed from the other party at all times.

18

I actually saw the real email in the headers though!

19

Oh wow, Airbnb are really shite at how they write some of their software then!

2 Likes
20

I thought that was undisputed!!! :rofl::rofl::rofl:

2 Likes