As a renter, you have to provide several verifications (email, linkedin, google, phone number). I think you can get away with a single one. Sometimes, you'll be asked to provide a driver's license or passport for proof.

80% of the rentals I've been in weren't their primary home, so even if someone was to rob the place, there wasn't much to take. The most valuable thing would probably be the TV, but most places only had a 32-40" tv which goes for a few hundred bucks new.

While people aren't robbing Airbnb homes, there are several cases where they are getting completely destroyed.

Plus it doesn't really make sense to pay $150 a night to steal a $150 tv either.

Especially when you have announced who you were and provided contact details before you stole the TV. Maybe the theft just isn't worth it at that point.

If I want to steal a TV, it would actually be better to rob my neighbor's house when they are away. They will never know it is me, and I don't have to pay them for access to their house.

I highly doubt if car2go renter provides less personal information than AirBnB renter. I also think it would be easier for bad actors to get away for AirBnB robbery by simply claiming that missing items didn’t existed. In many places, in fact house owners would have little recourse because they are conducting hotel business without commercial license to start with. From economics perspective, it is absolutely amazing that AirBnB hasn’t became a gold mine for the professional thieves. We should investigate and understand these forces better and reuse them in other gig economy scenarios.

> I highly doubt if car2go renter provides less personal information than AirBnB renter.

The article is pretty clear about theses instances happening when they deactivated their background check. They may still provide more, but if they aren't check, it's meaningless.

> I also think it would be easier for bad actors to get away for AirBnB robbery by simply claiming that missing items didn’t existed.

Sure easier, but as the comment you were responding to said, theses aren't primary home, they doesn't contains much things that are worth stealing. Sure the renter will be able to claim he isn't guilty, but at the end of the day, if it takes you a day and cost you 100$ to steal 120$, it's not worth it.

> From economics perspective, it is absolutely amazing that AirBnB hasn’t became a gold mine for the professional thieves.

It's more like a coal mine, sure there's money to be made, but you can't always make them profitable.

I just signed up on HomeAway, which I think is owned by VRBO. There was no background check, no ID to submit, and it didn't even ask me to make an account / password to reserve the place. Just an e-mail address. I finally had to set a password when I realized I made a mistake during signup.

On Airbnb, I understand there is verification of identity checks. Secondly you'd need to pay to rent an expensive place in advance (which could be done fraudently) followed by the fact that it's much harder to fence furniture relative to cars which are more uniform.

Simply put, I imagine there is more money is stealing cars.

As to "selling the house", this often requires a serious amount of paperwork and is harder to do.

There was a story a few years ago about someone renting an AirBnB to run a meth lab

The cars stolen start in the mid $30k range.

Your average AirBnB probably has under $1k worth of stuff with any sort of resale value - a TV or two, maybe the smaller appliances.

You could cause plenty of monetary damage by smashing holes in the walls, but that doesn't benefit the thief much.

AirBnb's business is not the CRUD app. Craigslist has that. AirBnb's value add is the vetting of participants, reputation, dispute resolution, and payment escrow system.

Accounts that abuse houses can and do get negative reviews visible to future hosts, fines/fees from the homeowner enforced by the platform, or even banned (along with government IDs and Facebook accounts they have verified).

AirBnB does have background checks. You just don’t know about them. I had a friend with an AirBnB account cancelled a few years ago because of a 12-year-old hot check misdemeanor conviction. They provided no way to appeal, no way to even explain, just an email saying he had been cancelled because of “criminal history.”