Before making a reservation through services such as Airbnb, and Before you rush to book this comfortable and adorable accommodation, you need to be careful with any scams you may encounter along the way.
ΤChristmas is approaching and most of us want to travel again, while following the precautionary measures taken by the countries regarding the pandemic Covid-19.
And of course travel also means finding accommodation. While some like to arrange their travels through travel agencies and choose to stay in a hotel, others want to get to know the cities they will be visiting by staying in accommodation located in modern, authentic neighborhoods and can be booked through services such as airbnb. However, before you rush to book this comfortable and adorable accommodation, you need to be careful with the scams you may encounter along the way.
According to experts of the global cybersecurity company ESET These are just a few things to keep in mind when booking accommodation in airbnb.
1. Payments outside the Airbnb platform
Finally, you have found where you will stay for the vacation of your dreams! The photos look good, they are close to the sights you would like to visit or it is located in a nice neighborhood and generally everything looks great. However, once logged in hosts try to persuade you to contact and pay outside the Airbnb platform. This should immediately alarm you, as everything should be done through the app itself, if nothing else for the reason that the service provider has no obligation to reimburse charges paid outside of its platform.
Even the airbnb warns for such scams and urges customers to immediately report hosts requesting out-of-platform payments. So if this happens, refuse to work with the host and contact Airbnb to resolve the issue.
2. An excellent offer, click on the link!
Most of us travel either for business or leisure. And travel is even more attractive after the removal of some COVID-19 restrictions, something that fraudsters know very well. Therefore, it is very likely fraudsters to pose as Airbnb to try to deceive unsuspecting victims and steal their access and personal information. It can receive an email that looks like a genuine Airbnb email and advertises a great offer. However, if you click on the link, it will either redirect you to a fake login page and once you enter your credentials the fraudsters will get them, or you may download malware on your device.
While most email services are now more than capable of filtering out this type of scam, some phishing emails may be out of control. So, If you ever receive an unsolicited email, especially one that contains a link or attachment, do not click on it. To see the full URL, you can hover over the link to see where it redirects, and to stay safe, it's best to go straight to the official Airbnb website by typing it into your browser's address bar.
3. Apartments that are too good to be true
As you search the Airbnb platform for the perfect Christmas holiday rental, you may come across offers that will drive you crazy at first glance. Usually, these are luxury homes, in aristocratic locations at ridiculously low prices - Imagine a villa on the French Riviera for a few hundred dollars a night. Sounds too good to be true? Well, it probably is - chances are you've fallen for a scam and you should definitely avoid booking.
However, If you decide that you're going to try your luck, it's best to do your research. The first thing you could do is look at the area where the apartment or house is located and analyze the average rental rates to see if they are unusually low. Another option is to reverse the image to see what is displayed - you may find that the images have been stolen from another website, which means that the offer or property is probably fake. If your suspicions are confirmed, you should report them immediately to Airbnb.
4. Beware of fake reviews
As you hunt for the accommodation of your choice, you will probably be looking for the combination of best price, location and comfort. This usually requires a lot of searching and research on the reviews made by previous tenants. While you're looking for great accommodation, you'll be on the lookout for anything suspicious. For example, new listings that have a surprisingly large number of good reviews or if the reviews are too similar - all of these can be signs that there is fraud.
The best you can do is to look for hosts that have gone through the Airbnb verification process. Scammers are probably not going to use genuine documents to verify their identities if they are planning to defraud people to get money from them. Another item you may be looking for is hosts rated as Superhost, as they have a history of excellent service and a low cancellation rate.
In summary
It was a difficult time and most of us want to get some rest. While we deserve it, we need to stay vigilant and look carefully for signs of fraud while looking for great vacation deals. In summary, according to experts from the global cybersecurity company ESET it must: be careful when it comes to spectacular deals, research more about the accommodations you want to book and of course be especially wary of spam emails with links that point to "great" deals.
Press Release
Do not forget to follow it Xiaomi-miui.gr on Google News to be informed immediately about all our new articles! You can also if you use RSS reader, add our page to your list by simply following this link >> https://news.xiaomi-miui.gr/feed/gn
Follow us on Telegram so that you are the first to learn our every news!
1 comment
Your article is so one-sided and term benefit of the bank, err, of Airbnb. You completely ignore professional hoteliers trying to reduce the cost of sourcing Airbnb platforms. Not everyone is a scammer when they give a shitload of money to have their own pages and try to promote Direct bookings through their page.
Airbnb and any such platform is necessary for the professional because of huge advertising, but this does not mean that when the owner who always paid his taxes, with licenses etc is a scammer when he tries to promote his own platform and offer more economically accommodation to the prospective client.