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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

Might have even been the same meth c[r]ooks.

Kudos to Dayton for keeping a balanced perspective on the situation, and not equating customer service clumsiness with indifference.

I like AirBnb. I will continue to use AirBnb as a guest. (Hypothetically if I were to be a host, I would only rent a hardened/rental-only property with careful assessment of the potential guests.) I am also still bullish on the general theme that the transparency and efficiency of the net makes peer-to-peer transactions between strangers more safe and easy than ever before.

But they're going to have to innovate on 'trust and safety' to avoid any impression they're AirBnBnMethDen.

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AirBnBnMethDen could vet the meth ahead of time as a service to both host and guests -- making sure it's of sufficiently high quality such that side effects of extreme paranoia and violent criminal outbursts are reduced. Guests would have purer, better highs; hosts would have the comfort of knowing that the meth addicts renting their apartments are 10% less likely to take an axe to their bedroom closets. Win-win. Classic pivot.

> Might have even been the same meth c[r]ooks.

That's what I thought as well (both are SF Bay Area), though it's only a guess. The combination of meth-heads and identity theft seems weird to be repeated. I would even tentatively guess at the meth-heads trashing apts being a cover for someone else who got the idea of using AirBnB to acquire documents for an identity-theft ring, but who knows, it's possible there are actually meth-heads who are also into identity theft, or who at least know someone to sell the documents to.

If you were gathering documents for an identity theft ring, would you go on a juvenile and pointless rampage in the houses you pilfered? Probably not, since that would only tip off the person being targeted to lock their credit. This is absolutely small time amateur shenanigans.

Imagine how the whole deal sounds from the angle of a drug addicted person who is comfortable committing petty/medium property crimes to fund their lifestyle. Unsuspecting urban/suburban dwellers will let you in their houses, unmonitored, for days or weeks, leaving them full of valuables and personal information, in exchange for a small fee that will never even be paid? Sounds like a criminal paradise to me.

> would you go on a juvenile and pointless rampage in the houses you pilfered?

Maybe EJ didn't have much in the way of credit to her name so they just trashed the place. It's what jerks do anyways when they either empowered or unsupervised.

Although I don't think that an identity theft ring would be able to generate enough cash using Airbnb's hosts, a small scale noobish operation could certainly gain some traction and maybe the people who've actually had their identity stolen don't know about it because nobody bothered to trash their apartment. So maybe the jerk who kicked EJ's toilet to death actually did everyone a favor and brought this out into the open.

Meth addicts seem to like identity-theft, so that correlation is not especially unique. See for example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/11/us/11meth.html

(Identity theft is also the perfect precursor to evading what payment- and identity- checks do exist in an AirBnb-like system.)

Interesting; thanks for the link. That's kind of a fascinating connection between drug chemistry, socioeconomic settings, and crime. Given that background, two meth-use-with-ID-theft incidents don't seem as weird to find in an AirBnB-like setting, which seems almost perfect for the kinds of people described in that article.

> it's possible there are actually meth-heads who are also into identity theft

Not just possible, it's actually quite common, and has been for awhile. For example, see this article from 2004:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4460349/

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