What is a vacation rental scam?

How do vacation rental scams happen?

Online vacation rental websites can represent a risk for both property owners and customers. Vacation rental scams can take various forms:

• A fake listing, with pictures sourced online and filled with phony details. Although fake, scammers can create very convincing listings, and, as reservations are often immediate, the money will be long gone before the customer finds out;
• In some cases, scammers can hijack legitimate listings and replicate them on other platforms to collect payments. As soon as they are flagged, scammers disappear with the money, without the owner even knowing;
• In other cases, the ‘guest’ could be a bad actor who defrauds the owner by sending malicious links to collect personal information, which is later used for other fraudulent activities.

How to identify vacation rental fraudsters.

Red flags are sometimes hard to spot, but there are signs that can help identify fraudsters:

1. One of the biggest warning signs is when someone asks you to leave the listing platform and use a third-party channel to make a payment. Most of the time, it will be combined with off-record conversations, conducted outside the dedicated chat feature, in order to avoid being flagged by keyword monitoring software;
2. Some scams are called “too good to be true” for a reason. If a listing offers an outstanding property, with great amenities for a low price, maybe it is because the opportunity is indeed too good to be true and should be avoided;
3. Other signs may also give it away: poor writing and grammatical errors in the property descriptions, suspiciously positive reviews, or no reviews at all, or realtors asking for far too much personal data while booking.

Hospitality service providers have an obligation to implement a secure framework of tools and technology to protect their business and customers, and to stay ahead of the competition.

How to avoid holiday rental scams as a travel portal owner.

As a listing platform or booking services provider, protecting customers and securing transactions should be a top priority. To do so, businesses must adopt strong screening procedures, whether they’re realtors renting properties or travelers looking for accommodation or services. As well as being secure, it’s also important for the consumer experience to be smooth and quick.

Thanks to automated ID checks via IDnow AutoIdent, confirming an identity has never been easier.

• Consumers can confirm their identity through their smartphone in just a few minutes.
• With just a selfie and a government-issued identity document, IDnow can conduct both identity document and biometric verifications.
• AutoIdent also runs liveness checks, adding another layer of security and preventing identity spoofing.
  

Safeguard your holiday rental portal with automated IDV.

IDnow AutoIdent verifies documents anytime and anywhere. It supports 30+ languages in 195 countries and leverages modern AI and machine learning technology to ensure secure identity verification, backed by a superior user experience.

While staying compliant with the most recent KYC regulations, the screening process allows the customer and the property owner to feel secure. As AutoIdent is customizable, it allows businesses to adapt its screening process to certain criteria. For example, dubious phone numbers with a country code different from the realtor’s declared nationality may raise eyebrows and thus trigger a screening process.

All FAQs about holiday rental scam.