https://medium.com/p/4530d0062e60/responses/show
https://medium.com/@lisbethkaufman_82625/im-one-of-the-cofou...
She also claims their assessment of people signing up to KitSplit is effective at blocking 99.99% of bad actors and stopping millions of dollars of theft on the platform, almost surely an exaggeration.
If this is true, they should easily be able to afford to self insure against theft by charging 10 cents per thousand dollars of gear rented.
Odd that they don't do that huh.
Which makes sense--if you're planning on stealing the equipment, you'd probably expect to have your account banned so you'd probably try to steal as much as possible while the account is still considered legitimate. As in this case where the author alleges that the same person also stole someone else's gear on the same day.
If it's not representative of the actual risk KitSplit will face, then it's also not representative of the actual risk users will face. And if it's not representative of user risk, then it's deceptive for KitSplit to bring it up as a way to defuse the situation or suggest that consumers shouldn't be worried.
The article paints in painful detail how the website claims one thing and the contractual terms do the opposite, resulting in the user being suckered by fine print. Literally, this is a problem of false advertising.
Instead of proper fixes to the problem, they will add more fine print and more reasons to rub it in your face when your gear gets stolen.
In the end, there's not even a "contact me to get this sorted" link; it's just another call to engage with first-tier support some more.
Just use Craigslist if you're looking to make money off your high-end gear; at least then, you can know with a higher likelihood that you're being scammed.
That is much much much better than this scenario. It's a big mystery also how the company claims to take a deposit for the full value of the equipment, and then apparently just keeps the deposit themselves when the item is stolen? Really?
99.99 means one stolen item out of 10,000. So they'll make $210,000(using articles info) but can't pay $3,500 to cover a stolen item out of that revenue. I bet the CEO is lying about the theft rate.
Ouch, so this isn't the first person to get bit by this on KitSplit, just the first one to get traction. These companies need to get called out way more.
So perhaps KitSplit's strategy of blocking bad actors is to redefine them as neutral ones, converting millions in theft into millions in "partings" - which might not be an exaggeration.
Interesting way to phrase it: "..effective at blocking 99.99% of bad actors". It sounds precise yet it is anything but because it says nothing about how many "bad actors" there are. Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? And over what period of time? A year? A day? 5 minutes? Any one of those factors could make orders of magnitude difference to the chance that one's property will be stolen.
If fraud were really as infrequent as they seem to suggest, then it seems like they should be able to absorb the losses. As it is, it appears they've so far concluded that the negative publicity will cost them less than the actual losses.
Elsewhere is the figure 0.1%, off by a factor of 10. It's not clear whether 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000 rentals results in theft.
However, just because 1 in 1000 rentals results in theft doesn't mean one's assessment is 99.9% effective in blocking bad actors.
Bad actors are currently a tiny minority of their users. Apparently 1 in 1000. If you blocked 99.99% of them, then theft would drop to 1 in 10,000,000 rentals. Her claimed numbers make no sense in the context of their actual theft rates. And yes, legally under criminal law it is theft, it is not voluntary parting. Voluntary parting does not appear to be a principle from criminal law and instead is something invented by insurance industry contract attorneys to deny responsibility for insurance claims.
So you gotta purchase optional insurance in additional to the 22% platform fees. Certainly makes the prospect of renting out my kit worth thousands of dollars for literal tens of dollars all the more attractive.
I can't see this as anything other than "privatizing the profits, socializing the losses" approach that most new gig-economy startups use. First they try to get away with as much as possible, until negative PR or legal requirements forces them to change. And then it's suddenly "a new feature" that they're so proud to announce (even though they created the problem in the first place).
just a pile of incoherent absurd BS. Looks like that CEO has no idea what she is talking about. How for example does she think auto accidents are handled when both participants have the same insurance company?