I received about five emails in Chinese yesterday morning from “express@airbnb.com”. I marked them as spam and was about to go on with my day, when I checked my account. Someone in China had hacked my account and made a reservation in China (I’m in North Carolina). After a good amount of time searching for a number to call, I was able to reach Airbnb by phone and tell them the situation. The first person I spoke to yesterday was very polite, and seemed interested in helping: he said that the department that handles fraud would not be in for a little while and they would contact me within 2-3 hours. I never heard from them yesterday, so this morning I responded to their ticket confirmation email this morning (one was automatically sent letting me know the issue was being escalated) and let them know I was still waiting.
A couple of hours after this I received an email letting me know that they hadn’t heard from me and would be closing the case if they didn’t. I called and let them know that I still needed to correct the issue, but the person that I was speaking to was clearly in a training class (for every question I asked, I could hear someone else telling him what to say), so I asked for a supervisor. After twenty minutes of going back and forth (I was at work and had changed my password with a generator and wasn’t able to confirm these numbers, but offered any other personal information he would need), I logged on to my credit card company site and gave him what I assumed he might have.
After another wait, I finally had a supervisor on the phone who was short, rude, spoke over me and was consistently sarcastic, asking “why am I on the phone with you? Why do you think you need to talk to me? Why do you think that this had to come to me?” I continued attempting to tell her the issue, and she continued to speak over me. She flat out refused to help with the fraud that they allowed to happen. After the call with Airbnb – who has still not done anything about the charges they allowed to happen – I called my credit card company, who handled it immediately.
I regret having scheduled another booking with them next April (they have a strict cancellation policy, so I’m basically stuck) and will be letting everyone I know that this is not a company that can be trusted with personal information. I have tried to remove all credit cards from my account, but am unable to remove the default card. The level of disrespect and disregard for their customers is past distasteful.
The same exact thing happened to me. I reported the issue to them 3 weeks ago, and today I finally called customer service again after not receiving any responses. The rep asked for my name, birthday, AND PAYMENT METHOD! Why does my payment method matter? I was asked to enter my payment method on my account, which I will never do becaus I’m sure it’s be compromised AGAIN.
Go to Walmart/a check cashing place/anywhere that sells reloadable Visa cards. Put $20-$50 and plan on using it for groceries/whatever.
Use your newly purchased reloadable card as your payment method on Airbnb, delete your old payment info. Good sites don’t physically delete accounts, but do physically delete payment info. Keeping payment info around – encrypted or not – is a liability that most smart companies don’t want to deal with.
Having read through these reviews, I’m not sure that’s the case w/ Airbnb. Thanks for the warnings, both hosts and guests.
Why would anyone take that treatment from a vendor when you can just dispute the charge with your credit card company?
Why would anyone feel stuck with a booking with a company which was involved in credit card fraud?
I would have disputed all the charges with my credit card company and at the slightest hint of need, I’d have asked the credit card company to cancel that card and issue a new card/number. Let Airbnb try to submit charges to a closed account.
Good call. New payment regulations put the fault on the least-complaint point – and the weakest link is typically the application. I don’t see Airbnb staying in business past 2017.