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Comment by rdouble | Hacker News Reader

This is a 37 year old woman who lived in NYC for 6 years and then spent two year traveling to places like Brazil and Bogota, Columbia. At this point she knows that people suck and shit happens. She definitely does not have PTSD from this experience. I take back any thing that might have suggested I agreed with the conspiracy theorists. This woman is BROKE and she's trying to spin this hard to get some sort of payout from AirBNB.

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There's a world of difference between seeing shit happen to other people and having it happen to you. You might think you're ready to handle it, but the moment you're violated it will likely affect you in ways that you could never really imagine. (and that's not to say that everyone will fall apart - but it's almost never what you expected)

In my previous post I mention a similar burglary DID happen to me. Honestly, one cleans up and gets over it.

Who exactly are you trying to claim the "conspiracy theorists" are? People who believe her story more than Airbnb's response?

As far as I can tell, she's not trying to get some sort of payout from Airbnb. If she were, it would be much easier to threaten to sue, and then settle out of court, than to post about it on her blog. I think that she was just trying to warn people about the risks of Airbnb; that while it's all been pretty safe and a rewarding experience for everyone involved so far, she's managed to have the inevitable first truly awful experience, and Airbnb basically offers nothing to help deal with the situation.

Of course she knows that people suck. But sometimes you can be lulled into a false sense of complacence. No one has had problems so far. You get to talk to the person beforehand. And you may believe that Airbnb has better safety procedures than they actually do; you figure that they've done their homework, do some sort of basic screening of hosts and guests, when in fact they actually do nothing and don't give you enough information to do it yourself.

Have a little sympathy for her. Even if you know people suck, it can be traumatizing when it actually happens to you. She had her apartment vandalized, many of her most personal belongings stolen, her identity stolen, her credit card stolen and used.

Who exactly are you trying to claim the "conspiracy theorists" are?

Guys like spolsky who suggested it might be a group of goons hired by a hotel association.

I now just think she got burglarized, and found out the hard way that SFPD can't really do much to help. She probably doesn't have renter's insurance, which does not apply in the case of an illegal sublet anyway. She's a freelance writer, so she's probably broke and therefore trying to squeeze something out of AirBNB.

Oh, sure. I don't think that this was some sort of hotel conspiracy. I think it was some douchebags who decided that the anonymity provided by Airbnb would make a great cover for some extensive identity theft. I agree, the conspiracy theorists are jumping to conclusions here.

But why would you assume that she's trying to squeeze something out of Airbnb, as opposed to what she said, which is to warn people about the risks and about the fact that Airbnb basically has no plan and offers no real help for how to deal with this sort of situation? I've seen nothing other than an explanation of what happened, and a clarification that their spin on the issue doesn't really match up with her experience.

That's just my cynical take on things from dealing with stuff like this in the past.

I honestly don't think there's much AirBNB can do to vet people which wouldn't make the service unusable.

There's plenty they could do. They could offer insurance for this sort of situation (yes, they'd have to add an insurance fee or increase their rates for this to make business sense). They could implement credit card address verification, and require that a credit card be in their system for some period of time (3 or 5 days) with a hold on it before someone can make their first rental, which would make it a lot less likely that someone could effectively use a stolen credit card. They could verify phone numbers of guests and hosts by calling them (perhaps even with an automated system, that calls someone up and asks them to punch in a number they got when signing up for Airbnb), which would give an additional piece of evidence about someone's identity if needed. They could implement a trust system in which people with established histories using the system can vouch for someone else, and if no one vouches for you, then you need to do one of the above steps or some other form of additional identity verification. I'm sure there are other ideas that I haven't come up with that would also help and not be too cumbersome; these are just a few off the top of my head.

I don't think that any of these would make the service unusable; if they did all of them, it might be a bit cumbersome, but implementing one or two of these measures would be fine. They would add a little bit of friction, for sure, but I think that it would be worth it for avoiding these sorts of awful situations.

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