Why would someone pretend to be a homeowner and hand over their keys and pets to an unpaid house guest?
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Well I choose not to live in fear, but have you heard of s@x trafficking and other crimes fit for Law & Order reruns? It may not be the person’s home. There may be bodies in the attic. It may be an empty lot with a slow moving van pulling up to the curb. I am not a young woman (not a target), and I am a native NYer so I come ready to resist at the first sketchy sign. But the risk is there.
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Perhaps I’m naive but there must be easier ways to lure victims then creating an account on a pet sitting site and creating a fake residence filled with fake pets.
If sitters were routinely snatched it would be fairly easy for authorities to find the link between the fake house and the missing sitters.
If you’re truly concerned then stick with hosts with good credentials. Human traffickers aren’t likely to garner all that many 5 star reviews.
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Since I am mentioning a senario that is not my own first hand experience, I will leave it here. But I mentioned it because it is similar.
In fact, after talking with the local home host I sat for, it turned out that the same female applied to one of my home host listings but based her her profile, I declined her application. I believe I dodged that bullet, as they say.
The booking fee has me pausing my membership but it is posts like yours that the show the lack of THS resolution/support that also have me questioning continued support of the network.
Of course, maybe a $12.00 booking fee would have avoided all this…….
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I agree. The risks you listed are virtually identical whichever side of the door bell you’re standing. Add to shared risks are those risks carried solely by the homeowner.
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Wow. Sounds like they claimed to be international to avoid a background check. I do hope THS takes action.
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Everyone takes a risk the moment they wake up and step out the door.
As a sitter, the risk is you stumble into a sketchy situation. OK, you can turn around and leave. There may be consequences but in a really risky situation (eg you walk into a brothel) of course this is an easy answer.
For a HO, we now have someone in our home who is not what they represented. Much harder to physically remove them, and in the meantime they can be wrecking your house or hurting your animals.
Not the same risk level at all.
And silly to suggest that someone would fake a listing with a home they don’t own or rent, be there to greet you, then what? Sell you to slavery? I hate to break this to you, but this happens anyway without needing the guise of a THS listing, and procuring a home to lure you to. They can probably just grab you off the street, why would anyone do this? Really any instances of Sitters disappearing into s*x slavery after showing up for a THS sit? No. There are actual confirmed cases (reported in the news) of THS sitters robbing homes, harming pets, etc.
Not the same risk levels at all.
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What are the security processes on home exchange platforms ?
I agree. Yet THS does not make it possible to see whether sitters had missing reviews. On the sitter side, experienced sitters know that missing reviews may be red flags, and that one needs to use the app to check whether the HO had any.
THS keeps this completely from homeowners. This is the greatest security flaw in the system. Fixing this would be much better than improving “verification”.
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The absence of a review isn’t always a sign of a serious dissatisfaction. It could be misunderstood communications during the sit, sensitivities are very common, or people who did not take the time to do this review on time. It also can happen for repeated sits.
In the case of a serious problem, people fill out a review except rare people ( in my opinion).
We could indeed ask THS what they do to guarantee transparency when a problem has been reported to their team on a sit that has not been reported in a review.
Would you choose a sitter without reviews if you could see that they were not new but that they had done previous sits that the HOs had not written reviews for?
Usually, if the HO was reluctant to write a review it would be for reasons that are much less serious than the ones in this thread. But poor behaviour could escalate.
Of course if the sitter has no reviews that’s worrying; I wanted to talk about gaps in the reviews.
I have 1 or 2 missing reviews and nothing went bad during my sit. But who knows if the HO was upset by something.
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This is also my experience. A lack of reviews doesn’t necessarily signal a hidden message; there are always exceptions. I once spoke with a homeowner who had hosted four or five sitters without reviewing any of them. When I asked her directly why that was, she explained that she simply doesn’t leave reviews as a rule, but she would, of course, be happy to write one for me if asked. Occasionally, it might simply be a matter of asking.
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I wouldn’t bother asking, because there are so many sits and so many hosts who write reviews. I’d just immediately skip any host who routinely didn’t write reviews.
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This seems to be a case where a sitter tried to avoid a background check by giving a false phone number. This would be fraud, probably because they would not have passed the background check.
This is not the same as HO not writing reviews because a sitter didn’t walk the dog or left a mess. Or even had one or two unauthorized guests, they had literally 52 people over.
What’s strange is this was a repeat sitter so I am wondering if the first sit was to just to view the place with the intention of returning to throw a party (possibly for a profit).
But I don’t think this issue would be avoided at all by HO seeing sitters with no reviews. If they had done this before they would have likely been tossed off the platform (as they should be now - just proving a fraudulent phone number should be enough to do it but add on so many unauthorized guests and police involvement…should be a no brainer).
My reply was to the sitter claiming they had equal risk and providing a ridiculous example of being abducted and sold into slavery when arriving at a sit since THS doesn’t background check HO.
They had provided a phone number where they could be reached. I cannot see anything false or fraudulent about that.
I don’t believe that the phone number is used for the background check. The background check for US sitters is done based on the ID that the sitter submits. In their profile, I suppose the results are still shown like this:
I doubt that the procedure is watertight, because I wonder how they can make sure that the sitter is the person that was checked. But I assume that your sitter could have passed this check.
Hosts cannot see that sitters have missing reviews from other hosts. A sitter with 20 good reviews could either have had 20 sits, 200 sits or more. A host can not know. At least I haven’t figured out how.
I don’t like that blind spot as a host but I can see an argument that hosts tend to be more cavalier about THS paperwork than sitters and that sitters should not be dinged because a host drops the ball post travel.
If you read the OP’s post and subsequent comments, this sitter listed themselves as from Brazil but the police confirmed they are a US resident. This was likely done to avoid a US background checked (probably because they have a criminal record already).
And providing a number representing it as your personal number when it is a phone in a public establishment is fraud, as is signing up with a Brazil location when they are now confirmed by police to be a US resident (again likely to avoid a full background check).
They did this to likely throw a party (for profit). It happens around holiday periods. AirBNB has protections in place (especially around New Year’s Eve) to prevent this but I guess this person figured out they could get a large house for free on THS for the same purpose and not have to deal with AirBNB’s rules.
That’s definitely a red flag not having full face photos on the sitter’s profile. What photos did she have? I have several on mine- all showing my handsome mug with various animals. As you suggest, it should absolutely be a requirement that sitters photos must show their face.
I imagine, what with all this increased income from the ‘booking fees’, this is something THS will action immediately…
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