To be fair, it was "Random Word...Air B n B"

But this has been going on, only with Barlcays for 2+ years and they have been told by Air B n B to stop it. And they just say screw off.

They have paid people AND corporations in my shoes for this exact scam in the past. But you have to spend your time and money doing it. And for most people 5,000 GBP letter/legal action >>> than the amt of $ they lost.

I'd really encourage anyone who thinks opening a corp. bank account is easy to check out an application... they are literally like 8 pages long. And they want to know EVERYTHING about you and your business. Which makes it very odd indeed.

Surely they would require some official correspondence from some sort of state authority to this business to verify its address and existence/operation in the UK, wouldn't they?

I remember when I set up an account at Barclays. I moved over to the UK from Australia and despite having a UK passport, I needed to show that I had a permanent place of residence over there. So I just used a national insurance letter I got.

do you have a source for this?

Yeah even if its called "Random Word...Air B n B" its still very weird that Barclays Bank allow what is clearly a scam account to remain open.

This is by far the most interesting part of your story.

Have you had any contact with Air BnB or Barclays about this issue ?

Also while I agree with what other people have said about it being naïve to make online purchases without doing sufficient research, there is no need to kick a man when he is down and rub his nose in it like it appears some people are doing.

The key issue here for me is why is Barclay Bank allowing proven scammers to continue to operate after apparently they have known this was going on for 2+ years.

I hope you ignore the trolls and keep us updated as you uncover more info about Barclays part in this as scam something seems very "phishy"

Yes. Take me at my word on this.

Is there a reason you cant post the evidence here ?

Yeah. I have good reasons. But by the end of next week I will if they don't make us whole.

I'm not going to slam A B n B until they have a chance to make it right, which they do and have indicated a desire to. They have an opportunity to turn a bad situation into good publicity for them, so I'd like to let them do that. I care less that something bad happened - I care if they don't fix it.

This story is interesting:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3027798/t...nario-planning

Barclays on the other hand is just a legal matter as they have done everything possible to be the opposite of helpful in this case, as well as other similar cases in the past 2 years. It's unclear why, but it's not for lack of awareness or that it's not in the right people's hands.

An idiot, Clearly. We've established that I'm dumb (so is my wife) and we mutually wander through life like Forrest Gump. Also, we've established that to use Air B n B safely for a long-term rental, someone needs significantly higher levels of overall intelligence and computer savvy than I possess or else they are at significant risk of being scammed.

That said...

It's also possible someone who thinks they are paying it to an escrow/middle-man which is essentially what Air B n B does would do this.

Finally:

Had we done that, we still would have been out $6,000. The $ amount doesn't really change anything.

I would love to hear you say that, or even anything, if you were standing over my wife while she was physically puking for the last 2 days because of how sick the entire situation made her.

of course it does. you'd have an extra $30,000 if you didn't hand all the money to them upfront.

your wife wouldn't be as upset if it were only $6,000.

just chalk it up to experience. you won't be so naive next time.

What exactly did airbnb do wrong? You didn't follow there steps the have set forth on there website or read any instructions or rules

Clearly Barclays is 100% at fault for allowing this account to be opened and then continue to operate even after they knew this account had already scammed other customers....

To be honest, on the list of problems this has caused, the money is at the bottom of the list. I'm very, very, very lucky to be able to say that.

For you to presume our happiness or sadness is proportional to the money lost is wrong on every level.

You might consider there is a human cost in these situations.

If I was running a $10 billion dollar web-site and the same scam had been going on where my trademark and brand had been used to open bank accounts for 2+ years at one specific bank, I would have spent some money to make sure that was stopped a long time ago. That would include bringing criminal charges against the bank and not making the customer do it.

I would also make sure that any customers that were using my site for the first time were made aware that scams were rampant on my site, like craigslist does, rather than assure customers that an ID verification system and positive reviews meant that someone was safe to deal with. Our "host" was fully verified with 4 positive reviews.

More or less, I would make it extremely clear that there were risk(s) associated with using my website on the home-page and I would clearly outline the known risks. I wouldn't make someone search to find that out. Craigslist does a good job of this.

Most importantly, if someone was defrauded as an honest user on my web-site, I would make sure they were made whole, regardless of whether I thought they could have been more careful or not. And I would work at my own expense, with the customer, to hold the fraudulent party accountable legally or otherwise.

I expect Air B n B to do this.

but your wife has been physically puking for two days. clearly it's about the money.

if it were $500 you were scammed out of she wouldn't be puking.

The excessive criticism of the OP here is pretty ridiculous. Would everyone fall for this? Def not. A ton of people would though.

Suggesting that the 2 businesses involved shouldn't have taken additional steps to limit the chance of this happening is dumb.

Generally speaking, that's not an accepted measure of valuing a business.

Here are the cliff notes for you:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/...ype=blogs&_r=0

Obviously there's trolling here.

This is a succinct summary of exactly what should have happened. And if it didn't happen, a business is ethically responsible (or legally, in Barclays case) to make it right.

I really think Air B n B will do just that. They would be silly not to.

But as I said, unfortunately there are way too many things that are non-money related which they aren't reasonably liable/or able to fix that get really screwed up when you get scammed in a situation involving living internationally.

The OP got on the front foot and said anyone would have fallen for this scam, including all of us. Because clearly everyone here is dumb enough to wire $36,000 to someone they don't know. At the very least most people would probably read the site's instructions pretty thoroughly before parting with that amount of money.

I emailed a link to this thread to TechCrunch. They love covering airbnb. Maybe they'll do an article on it.

I was trying to convey that it wasn't an unsophisticated phishing scam. Whether or not you, or some % of people wouldn't have isn't really the point. I shouldn't have said 99% of people. I should have said something more like "a large %" or "a significant %" or "many people" or whatever. Having seen the sequence of events and circumstances, it's my opinion that more people would have than you think, but I don't know for certain of course. I didn't even know what e-mail spoofing was the other day, so who am I to judge? Many people on this board are pretty tech-savvy. And there is a new scam every day. So who knows.

It doesn't really change anything.

If it's beyond a tiny chance for someone to fall into this trap (i.e it's somewhat predictable considering people have been doing it for 2+ years to the same bank using the same company's trademark in their account name etc) it's Air B N B's responsibility as a business to reduce those odds to as close to 0 as possible. That may conflict with the way they'd like their home-page to look with all of the messages of trust and security, but that's their responsibility if they want to be running an ethical business. They haven't done that, either by positing manifest and clear warnings or by taking Barclays to court and putting an end to it themselves. Sure, you can find warnings on their site - if you click about 6 different links and know exactly what you are looking for. If you don't, you're not going to see the warnings.

As I said, it's not as if everything happens via the platform and there's no e-mail involved. When you send or receive a message on the platform with their messaging service, you get an e-mail from Air B n B legitimately telling you this. So suddenly saying someone should know they should not be receiving any more e-mails from Air B n B with instructions or whatever isn't fair.

And all of that is true, whether you think I have the IQ of an ant or not. It just so happens that I've probably traded several million dollars in online funds in the last few years and never been scammed. So my IQ is probably a bit higher than that of an ant, which should make the story a bit more alarming to those of you who think you would never, ever fall for something like this. You could, and you might, and if it happens, I can promise you that you never saw it coming.

I hope it never happens to you. It's no fun.

Thanks. I'm really not trying to slam until they're giving a chance to respond.

I hope that Air B n B sees this as an opportunity for them.

They do have the chance to turn this into a "good" story, and their reaction here will say as much about them as a company as anything else. If they still do not take Barclays to task, put up serious, obvious, and clear warnings, and make us whole, they are simply not being a responsible company.

If they do these things, there's not really anything bad I can say about them except that they didn't do it sooner and more people were hurt before things changed.

That is kind of my point.

Revils I don't really know if you are making excuses to make yourself feel better or not. I'm not here to slam you and I really hope you get the money back.

However, stick to facts please. I just navigated to AirBnB once on the website it takes ONE click on 'trust and safety' to get this displayed "A Secure Platform

Guests pay through Airbnb when they book a listing. Hosts receive payment through Airbnb 24 hours after guest check-in. With all the transactions taken care of, all you have to do is say “Hello.”

That clearly tells you what you actively (or your wife) did wrong. I can say with confidence that 1 click of mouse > sending $36.000. Or even 6 clicks of mouse > sending $36.000.

I do agree with you that Barclays seem to be doing something very fishy by seemingly keeping a scam account open for 2 years. You might have a solid lawsuit against them?

They're not going to put up huge warnings saying there's a decent chance you'll get scammed if you use their site. That would be incredibly stupid from a business perspective and can't be expected, even if it would be the fair thing to do given that they apparently have verified/positively rated members running scams. I also doubt the problem is as widespread as you might think.

They do need to pursue the Barclays thing though, and I'd be shocked if they're not already throwing a lot of money at it. Something is seriously wrong there.

BTW the company is called Airbnb, not "Air B N B". I'm guessing the scam company has some name with "B N B" standing for something else, making its actual name pretty different from Airbnb and hence causing difficulties getting rid of them.

BTW, how did the host/scammer get your e-mail address? Surely airbnb isn't dumb enough to provide that to them?