“I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb”-Allie Contie (5,750 words)

All I can say about this article is wow. The facts of this article are not necessarily surprising, but it still makes my blood boil. The story begins with Contie’s experience with an Airbnb host that suddenly canceled her reservation and sent her to another place to stay that was disgusting and kicked them out after one night. After some digging Contie soon finds that this is a lot more than one bad experience. 

People are setting up multiple accounts, advertising suspiciously similar apartments, giving clients loads of almost exactly the same experiences, and taking full advantage of Airbnb’s lax policies. Like mentioned before, the fact that this is occurring is not surprising. Scammers are everywhere and will do anything to make a buck. What is surprising is that there are so many of these issues and Airbnb has not done anything to deal with them. They are allowing people to take advantage of people who cannot afford to fight back. 

I personally do not use Airbnb, never have, and maybe never will. They have a similar system to Uber that both parties can review each other but the fear of getting a retaliation review is ridiculous. People are afraid to leave bad reviews, allowing this system to keep on going. If nobody is leaving bad reviews, people are going to keep booking these places and continually be scammed. 

I feel that this story has a lot to offer and to steal. I liked the investigation aspect of this story. You are able to walk through this journey with the author. It makes it seem like those mystery shows where we are trying to find out who-done-it. It makes it more interesting and more invested into the story. I wanted to keep reading. I wanted to find out what was going on. It was a nice way to organize the story and keep the readers hooked.