“Everything gained by hard work is lost,” scammers say on Airbnb
Difficulties with data protection arose in the service of short-term rental Airbnb. There have been more cases of hacking the profiles of registered users, with the help of which fraudsters “remove” housing, and steal personal belongings of the owners from apartments.
Attackers hack into verified accounts of Airbnb users, change personal data and gain access to rented real estate. Real estate owners believe that they rent housing to honest registered users. Attackers take out of the apartments everything that can be stolen: electronics, furniture, art, washing machines. For Airbnb in this story, it is very unpleasant that it is the verified accounts that are required to guarantee the authenticity of users.
The Airbnb site after such crimes worked out the process of multiple authorization, with its help it is difficult to hack into the account of unauthorized persons. Users are required to undergo additional authorization when trying to log in from the device from which they registered. SMS is provided about the changes in their personal data.
Nate Blecharzik, co-founder of the site, said that there is ongoing work to prevent such cases. Trust is the main currency of the sharing economy.
Russian tourism industry experts believe that SMS verification will solve the problem, but the danger of deception remains. L. Pustov, editor-in-chief of the travel blog: Russia is one of the priority markets for the service: here their volumes were comparable to the volumes of leading Russian online travel agencies in 2015, and now they could overtake them. If I were a host, I would change my password and make it more complicated. And even when the guest arrives, you can ask him to present an identity card, Leonid Pustov suggested. He added that Airbnb previously told about insurance on the property of the owner in the amount of $ 1 million, which helped the service to attract landlords. This was confirmed by the company itself.
“We are committed to building a safe and trusted community around the world. Damage or theft of property is extremely rare. For such cases, we have introduced a guarantee for hosts up to $ 1,000,000, which is valid in Russia. We have also implemented new security measures to prevent account hacking on our platform, including SMS alerts and two-factor authentication, said A. Verbitsky, CEO of Airbnb in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Source and photo: tourdom