We just had a run in with a scam for a place in Majorca on Airbnb. The place looked amazing and was reasonably priced for what it was so I reverse image searched the pictures and it turns out they had lifted them from a resort in the Carribean. The google maps view of the place lined up nicely with the other property so they'd obviously put some time into choosing the right fake. Luckily we cancelled our booking within 15 mins. To their credit airbnb have taken it down pretty quickly.
A couple of months ago I tried to book an apartment for a 4-day weekend in Ibiza, Spain, for this very weekend. I was booking a big apartment, a place that could accommodate 6 couples. After finding two reasonably priced places (+€5,000 stay), and placing the respective face-value offers, I got told by both hosts to increase the price. One of them even asked me what my budget was. Really?!
I immediately contacted Airbnb to tell them what had happened, they apologised. Not only is that practice misleading to users and other hosts in the area, but I'm pretty sure it is illegal. The stock offer in the Mediterranean is very poor at Airbnb.
We finally went for a hotel, where the price was the one advertised. I haven't lost faith in Airbnb's business model, but unless they show they are out their catching fraudsters and other scams artists, I doubt I'll go back any time soon.
I've generally found AirBnB not to be useful in big vacation spots (Spanish coast or islands, the Caribbean, Mexican coast, etc.). There are a lot of scammy and mislabeled places, and even the legit places are for the most part just a regular commercial property that's listed itself on AirBnB along with everywhere else. So I stick to just using something like booking.com to find those places.
The unique aspect of AirBnB to me is when regular people who aren't in the professional hospitality business are renting out a spare room, or renting out their apartment when they're gone. But you rarely find those in places like Majorca; that's more for if you're visiting somewhere with a bigger population of actual residents, like Seattle or Athens.
I used to use tineye but google has enabled reverse image search and being google it has far more results. Go to google images and click the camera button in the search box. It's really useful for detecting scams like this, used to for an email flat scam in New Zealand too.
I was looking for apartments in Manhattan recently, and saw numerous listings like this, where the apartment looked considerably better than others in the area which were even more expensive. It doesn't look that realistic, though I can imagine if you hadn't worked out the price -> quality factor for the area you might be duped.
Agree that AirBNB is quite good at taking them down pretty fast, and I reported the ones I could see for being misleading.
