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Comment by g_sch | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be a general problem across the peer-to-peer rental industry. My friend had her car stolen while renting it out on Getaround and ended up in a similar situation.

These things seem to come and go in cycles. Airbnb and Uber faced several similar trust & safety issues of their own before they started building in much stronger safety and insurance protections and, crucially, convincing their customer base to continue trusting them. Now that their hard work has once again given people confidence in the P2P rental model, these upstarts are swooping in with none of the protections and reaping the benefits.

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I rent out a camper van, and this article has sparked me to contact my company to ensure I at least have this coverage, and to look into GPS monitoring.

If we understand things properly, her car apparently wasn't stolen, she "voluntarily parted" with it.

Thinking about it a bit, it actually does make sense. The language gymnastics are there to clearly distinguish this sort of thing from an act of theft.

Change the scene to that of a CEO who defrauds investors. The money was "voluntarily parted" by the investor; she didn't break into their house and steal the money. The money was obtained through fraud.

So "fraud", "theft through fraud", and yes, "voluntary parting".

The same kind of issues can't possibly apply to Airbnb, because no one can steal your house and run away with it. "Voluntary Parting" is the unfortunate case that is difficult to cover with insurance, unless Kitsplit decides to put aside money in the bank to cover these costs themselves. And Uber doesn't rent, so I don't think it's a 1:1 comparison here.

It's easy to an incredible amount of damage to a property.

For example, close a drain and turn on a faucet.

Then they also need departments for checking the authenticity of the claims as well. Insurance isn’t easy.

Well, there have been stories where folks clear out the apartment completely or significantly damage the apartments. A quick search for "airbnb stolen property" on Google will yield a few results.

The comparison would be with Turo, and stealing a car is grand theft auto so the cops would at least pretentd to care.

It's not theft, though. It really is voluntary parting, legally, so it's fraud. Police probably won't do anything. People have been in exactly this same situation with Turo.

To add to what others have said re: AirBNB, there have also been at least a few cases where renters refuse to leave the property and turn a mid-term rental into a sort of "squatting" situation, creating tremendous legal hassle for the owner. (Though I'm not aware of any cases where the squatter has actually managed to wrest ownership from the actual owner!)

Though not related to Airbnb, in Sweden there was a guy who couldn’t use his own apartment for one or two years since it was occupied by fraudsters. What a hellish situation that must be.

People don't rent out empty apartments on Airbnb... There's plenty of stuff that could be stolen out of an Airbnb

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