Three of us wanted to rent an apartment in Dubai so we went on the Airbnb website and found a host under the name Maria who had an apartment for rent supposedly on the 312th road. The host replied to us that the apartment was available and that she would send us a special offer through Airbnb; she sent us an email from Airbnb and we followed a link to make a payment that directed us to an Airbnb payment page. It said that the gateway was down after we entered our credit card details and that we would have to make a bank transfer to an account in Portugal under the name Diana Gore as instructed on the page. We emailed the receipt to Maria. When it was time to check in she sent us a guide with a contact number for the UK that did not work and left us circling the block trying to get her to reply to our emails. Then she vanished. When we contacted Airbnb they said that they can’t do anything for us because we paid outside their platform even though we found the listing on their site and were instructed to pay on a page that had their logo on it. They refused to take responsibility for having a fake host on their site. That means that it is very easy to list on their site and upload fake pictures. They should be responsible for people that have accounts with them. Simply terrible.
