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Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting because I always thought these "background checks" were just a formality. Like something needed for their insurance or to weed out a few extreme individuals (like those with multiple-DUIs or a heavy history of wrecks on their record).

But the fact that they can ease up on background checks and see an immediate large bulk of car thefts is damning evidence that the background checks were truly having a real impact on preventing theft. It really is fascinating.

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That sort of implies that there was some river of theft intent that they were keeping dammed up.

Which, could be the case, or it could be that announcing the policy change was the equivalent of announcing your upcoming month-long backpacking tour on Facebook after posting your address and photos of most of your valuables.

(It might be less declaring open season on theft, than a perceived increase in vulnerability triggering a surge in attempts to exploit it, more of which succeed than usual due to some actual increase in the odds of successful theft, complicated by the additional security risk posed by the confusion associated with a major policy change.)

You'd really need to dig into the surrounding data to find out which model is valid and in what proportions.

It’s probably a little of both. Remember Nextel? For a long time push to talk wasn’t interceptable by the police.

Nextel didn’t seek out street drug dealing networks as a customer base. But the cops figured out that they weren’t traceable and had great loud speaker phones, started buying them, word got out and suddenly you have a market.

> about 20 people who went on to orchestrate the Mercedes thefts set up some 80 phony accounts in Chicago, using fake or stolen credit cards as their payment methods.

It's not as much the background checks preventing the thefts as the basic identity checks. Even people with some criminal background would find themselves disincentivized to steal/vandalize the car knowing their identity is linked to it. But someone who goes out of their way to create a fake identity and become untraceable, known criminal or not, has no such disincentive.

There are probably discussion sites not dissimilar to this one where people who are into stolen credit cards and the like hang out to swap notes. It would only really take one person to post - hey check out this new thing - for a few to try it. I was a victim of a vaguely similar thing - having a squatter in my flat in Spain which went from something that didn't really happen to loads of them all of a sudden because someone put up a how to guide on the internet.

The "background checks" were probably excluding a lot of low-hanging fruit, like attempts at creating accounts in fake names with stolen credit card details.

Hell, a background check will pull up people with earlier criminal convictions (which, given our prison systems generation of recidivism is probably an unfair filter but one that rules out a lot of people in organized crime)

Isn't recidivism the kind of filter that causes people to become recidivist, though?

Absolutely. It’s one of the reasons that the school-to-prison pipeline is so profitable for private business. The younger you put the “Mark of Cain” on a citizen, the sooner they become a revenue opportunity.

I am doubting this data points. AirBnB has virtually no background checks and people are not robbing away houses en mass. Why AirBnB has such a different track record vs Car2Go?

On Airbnb, I understand there is verification of identity checks. Secondly you'd need to pay to rent an expensive place in advance (which could be done fraudently) followed by the fact that it's much harder to fence furniture relative to cars which are more uniform.

Simply put, I imagine there is more money is stealing cars.

As to "selling the house", this often requires a serious amount of paperwork and is harder to do.

There was a story a few years ago about someone renting an AirBnB to run a meth lab

As a renter, you have to provide several verifications (email, linkedin, google, phone number). I think you can get away with a single one. Sometimes, you'll be asked to provide a driver's license or passport for proof.

80% of the rentals I've been in weren't their primary home, so even if someone was to rob the place, there wasn't much to take. The most valuable thing would probably be the TV, but most places only had a 32-40" tv which goes for a few hundred bucks new.

While people aren't robbing Airbnb homes, there are several cases where they are getting completely destroyed.

I highly doubt if car2go renter provides less personal information than AirBnB renter. I also think it would be easier for bad actors to get away for AirBnB robbery by simply claiming that missing items didn’t existed. In many places, in fact house owners would have little recourse because they are conducting hotel business without commercial license to start with. From economics perspective, it is absolutely amazing that AirBnB hasn’t became a gold mine for the professional thieves. We should investigate and understand these forces better and reuse them in other gig economy scenarios.

> I highly doubt if car2go renter provides less personal information than AirBnB renter.

The article is pretty clear about theses instances happening when they deactivated their background check. They may still provide more, but if they aren't check, it's meaningless.

> I also think it would be easier for bad actors to get away for AirBnB robbery by simply claiming that missing items didn’t existed.

Sure easier, but as the comment you were responding to said, theses aren't primary home, they doesn't contains much things that are worth stealing. Sure the renter will be able to claim he isn't guilty, but at the end of the day, if it takes you a day and cost you 100$ to steal 120$, it's not worth it.

> From economics perspective, it is absolutely amazing that AirBnB hasn’t became a gold mine for the professional thieves.

It's more like a coal mine, sure there's money to be made, but you can't always make them profitable.

Plus it doesn't really make sense to pay $150 a night to steal a $150 tv either.

Especially when you have announced who you were and provided contact details before you stole the TV. Maybe the theft just isn't worth it at that point.

If I want to steal a TV, it would actually be better to rob my neighbor's house when they are away. They will never know it is me, and I don't have to pay them for access to their house.

I just signed up on HomeAway, which I think is owned by VRBO. There was no background check, no ID to submit, and it didn't even ask me to make an account / password to reserve the place. Just an e-mail address. I finally had to set a password when I realized I made a mistake during signup.

AirBnB does have background checks. You just don’t know about them. I had a friend with an AirBnB account cancelled a few years ago because of a 12-year-old hot check misdemeanor conviction. They provided no way to appeal, no way to even explain, just an email saying he had been cancelled because of “criminal history.”

The cars stolen start in the mid $30k range.

Your average AirBnB probably has under $1k worth of stuff with any sort of resale value - a TV or two, maybe the smaller appliances.

You could cause plenty of monetary damage by smashing holes in the walls, but that doesn't benefit the thief much.

AirBnb's business is not the CRUD app. Craigslist has that. AirBnb's value add is the vetting of participants, reputation, dispute resolution, and payment escrow system.

Accounts that abuse houses can and do get negative reviews visible to future hosts, fines/fees from the homeowner enforced by the platform, or even banned (along with government IDs and Facebook accounts they have verified).

real background checks tied to the real person. without background check, then you can't tell if someone used a stolen credit card or if it's the real person.

> But the fact that they can ease up on background checks and see an immediate large bulk of car thefts is damning evidence that the background checks were truly having a real impact on preventing theft.

No, it isn't “damning evidence”, it's at best a suggestive indication which is easily consistent with other alternatives.

In fact, there is extremely compelling evidence that the old background check policy was not what was protecting them in the article: “By midweek the company suspended service in Chicago altogether, an acknowledgment that it couldn’t figure out how to distinguish legitimate customers from the group of thieves.” The obvious first guess of how to distinguish legitimate customers from thieves would be exactly the method they had been using right before the event that has supposedly prevented similar evebts—suspend every new account that was checked until they agree to a background check and it is completed and, if the old method was really working, everything would be fine. This is so obvious that if they just threw up their hands and couldn't figure it out, it means either they didn't believe the system was doing it or they didn't believe the problem in Chicago represented a general problem that should be protected against, just a local aberration; either way, it doesn't really seem consistent with the idea that even they believe there is some widespread general problem that the background checks were preventing.

>damning evidence

I don't see anything here that would exclude coincidence.

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