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Comment by hluska | Hacker News Reader

Let's engage in a little thought exercise. Pretend that you are the Airbnb victim. You live in incredible fear of psychotic criminals and identity thieves. The fear is so uncontrollable that you "spend [your] mornings recalling nightmares and breathing through panic attacks."

Would you:

a) go into hiding at a friend's place and lay low?

b) go extremely public and take on a startup?

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Would you:

go into hiding at a friend's place and lay low? ... for a month, and then

go extremely public and take on a startup? ... after a month.

Yeah, I think I might just do that.

I would too. The person had been playing psychological games with her via email. This is not some teenager stealing a TV, this is a psychopath that plays long games with the victim the way a cat plays with a mouse before mauling and eating it. We are not talking some routine crime, there is a very sick component here that goes way beyond normal robberies. I carry (a gun in case it's not clear) in public and know how to fight, and I would feel extremely uncomfortable in my apartment until the perps were caught and in prison, not out on bail after something as twisted as what happened. ... Oh and yeah, I would also publicly trash the company (the two things are definitely not mutually exclusive) in order to warn other innocent people so they don't have to experience the terror and abuse that I went through. Unless the company fixed things. But obviously not knowing the identity of the person that was renting means they were a major contributor to the problem so I would definitely complain loudly, from wherever I was hiding out from the psycho killer.

This is a silly oversimplification. If the facts are as stated the victim is justifiable in their outrage at the company.

Take a step back and stop the tinfoilesque blame the victim game that you've decided to engage in.

People come in a wide variety of personalities.

The criminals already know everything about her (real name, likely her social security number, etc), what on earth does she have to lose by "extremely public" blogging?

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