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Comment by nhangen | Hacker News Reader

This is the same thing spammers do to steal money from people, and it's the same thing that dating sites do to pretend to have women interested in meeting dudes. Either way, it's fraudulent.

I don't hate that they did this, but I hate that they tried to pretend they were anonymous women that happened to really like AirBnB. Why be so shady about it and instead why not just be honest?

"Hey, we noticed your rental and thought you might like something we built. It's helped a lot of people fill vacancies and make money; check it out - url"

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I assume they couldn't be honest because it would've violated Craiglist's Terms of Use, namely:

You agree not to post, email, or otherwise make available Content:

k) that constitutes or contains "affiliate marketing," "link referral code," "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or unsolicited commercial advertisement;

l) that constitutes or contains any form of advertising or solicitation if: posted in areas of the craigslist sites which are not designated for such purposes; or emailed to craigslist users who have not indicated in writing that it is ok to contact them about other services, products or commercial interests.

m) that includes links to commercial services or web sites, except as allowed in "services";

I wonder if Craigslist could legitimately sue Airbnb.

Sue them for what, exactly? Coincidence?

While it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's happening here, it takes a bit more than connecting the dots to make a legal case stick.

[EDIT] Just to be clear I'm certainly not a fan of this. It strikes me as unethical and a little low on the "sleazy marketer" scale. I don't however beleive that this is illegal unless you can somehow prove that JillSmith03@gmail.com is professionally connected to AirBnB, and that this was done under corporate directive.

It's actually very easy to prove, because the same email was sent from several different accounts: you go after AirBnB directly and shoot for discovery, get them under oath to answer whether they did this or not.

If you have ever been questioned under oath, you know how tough it is to lie (ping me offline for details).

No point in chasing the gmail accounts themselves, that would be a dead-end.

this is correct - I've tried to reach out to CL ads to obtain early customers for a web app that would seem to solve their problem (and I'm very honest about it, saying it's our app), but it gets flagged as solicitation, with a note to post it elsewhere.

I assume AirBnB have received many cease and desist letters from craigslist. Craigslist is just waiting for AirBnB to get bigger so they can get big chunk of money.

I doubt it. I worked at a company that aggregated job listings from Craigslist. We actually didn't do anything insidious; in fact, we served up their jobs with attribution and if the job was clicked, it would take the user to the Craigslist site. So basically we were feeding them extra traffic.

They sent a cease and desist relatively early on (not waiting until we got bigger).

It's likely that they didn't know and have either just sent them a cease and desist or AirBnb has chosen to ignore it.

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