1.) they book a night at a cooperating-host with a stolen credit card
2.) host receives payment minus AirBnB fees 2 days later
3.) host transfers amount minus his own cut to criminals
4.) chargeback from CC owner. I'd guess that Airbnb either charges the Host for the chargeback or cancels the entire account. How is this „scalable laundering“?
If the scam is to get money out of stolen CCs and into your pocket, this is theft and fraud. The money isn't laundered if you can trace it back to a stolen credit card.
Money Laundering is taking money that you have, but can't justify having, and giving it a legitimate source. On Airbnb that might be pretending someone is paying lots of money to stay in your apartment. You pay yourself in dirty money. Now your dirty money looks like legitimate Airbnb income.
I'm sure Airbnb have the first kind of fraud. Anyone accepting CCs on the internet has it.
Actual laundering...? Seems likely. Real estate has always been a popular route. The article (like almost anything money laundering related) mixes and matches, so it's impossible to tell.
1.) get "illegal" money from somewhere/anywhere. Create bank accounts under fake names with the "illegal" cash.
2.) host receives payment minus AirBnB fees 2 days later
3.) host transfers amount minus his own cut to criminals
4.) AirBnB never gets notified of anything - it's just another happy customer.
So the problem with this scenario is AirBnB never knows about the problem - so all the "bad" hosts can go on for long times, and you dont need as many accounts; thats where the "scalability" comes in.
In USA, I don't see how this is "scalable" with the stringent "know your customer"[1] laws.
Using a fake drivers license + fake Social Security Number to open a new bank account with a false name is not trivial. Many banks also require a thumb print for identification. The customer's face is also captured on security cameras as he walked through the bank to open the account. All of that can be cross-checked with the FBI.
It seems the preferred method for criminals using banks to wash money is a "shell company" instead of fake personal accounts. E.g. Open a business account for a car washing company or restaurant. But then the criminal has to be careful and make sure his "pattern of deposits" does not raise suspicions. Any unusual banking activity could trigger an investigation for racketeering and money laundering.
For many this can be better than e.g. Stripe because AirBnB supports payouts to far more countries, making it easier to get lots of drop accounts. They even do WU in some countries.
I would also expect AirBnB to be slower to act on chargebacks than Stripe & Co.
I wouldn't expect this to be super scalable, but on the other hand while a few million a month is nothing for AirBnB it is an OK amount even when split across 100 eastern european guys.
This is a bit OT, but I looked up the Airbnb page to see what they accept: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/126/what-methods-of-paym...
I had thought that the general solution for handling worldwide payments was to use Paypal. How does Airbnb facilitate the handling of all these different kind of payment services? Is it a homegrown solution? Or is it not really a major technical problem for services to implement this on their own?
Second, Airbnb probably eats the cost of the chargeback since this is an online CNP transaction.