On Friday, 2/19/16, I tried to make a reservation on airbnb with Valorie in Santa Clara for a room. For some reason in making the reservation, I could not use my paypal account. I closed out of airbnb to try to investigate what was going on in paypal and everything was okay. There should have been no reason why my transaction would not have gone through. On Friday, the same day, I got a text from airbnb security with a 4 digit pin code to complete the transaction. I resumed trying to make the reservations for the room, and attempted to use paypal again, without success. Getting a little bit desperate to get this reservation completed, I entered my chase credit card number and continued trying to make the reservation, but I still needed to complete more information. The website asked for permission for me to verify myself and they wanted the following: Your e-mail account, access to your e-mail contacts(!!), and a picture of your drivers license, which I took a picture of and uploaded to the airbnb website. For me, to get an airbnb reservation for $50 a night, it was not worth revealing so much personal information including a picture ID which i did submit. When it requested my facebook, link’d in, e-mail and access to my e-mail contacts, I had to log out. I then logged back in and deleted my account. I will attempt now to contact technical support on airbnb’s www/https:// website. It is not secure!
UPDATE:
Two days later, on Sunday, February 21st, I got a chase credit card fraud alert with 6 new charges amounting to more than $879.00!! It seems obvious that these events are related! I had to cancel my chase card immediately.
Be warned your information may not be secure when using the Airbnb website!!
You probably entered a phishing site instead of the real airbnb site. It’s too bad you fell for it, why did you even upload your driver’s license pic as they requested. All these requests for personal information is suspicious enough and yet you were not aware.