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Comment by turdnagel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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