“And I think this has been a gradual, maybe too gradual, transition for our industry.” In part, Chesky suggested Airbnb would start asking more specific questions of guests upon checkout-relying on users, in other words, to help police what happens on the platform.

“I think many of us in this industry … are going from a hands-off model, where the Internet’s an immune system, to realizing that’s not really enough, that we have to take more responsibility for the stuff on our platform,” he said. Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s CEO and co-founder, said at the DealBook conference that the verification process is part of a dawning realization that, as he put it, “we have to take more responsibility for stuff on our platform.” After Conti’s story, Airbnb promised to “verify” all 7 million listings on the site by December 2020. In the aggregate, these emails paint a portrait of a platform whose creators are fundamentally unable to track what goes on within it, and point to easily exploitable loopholes that scammers have steamed their way through by the truckload. (Or, in some cases, a combination of several of these scams.) Scammers all over the world, it seems, have figured how best to game the Airbnb platform: by engaging in bait and switches charging guests for fake damages persuading people to pay outside the Airbnb app and, when all else fails, engaging in clumsy or threatening demands for five-star reviews to hide the evidence of what they’ve done. The stories quickly started to fall into easily discernible categories.

In response, we got nearly 1,000 emails, many of them outlining similar tales of deception.

Hoping to get a better sense of the issue, we asked readers to tell us about their own experiences using Airbnb.

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