Notorious Airbnb squatter may be the dev behind two flailing Kickstarter games | Hacker News Reader

Notorious Airbnb squatter may be the dev behind two flailing Kickstarter games

polygon.com

95 pointssmacktoward90 comments

In some ways, this is the dark side of disrupting established industries: legal protections aren't in place yet; it's not clear what recourse people caught in never before seen corner cases have.

We (e.g. HN folks) are quick to applaud people with new ideas that are shaking things up (e.g. Airbnb, Uber, etc.) I suspect this is the sort of scenario detractors (e.g. Seattle City Council re: Uber) are worried about.

Terrible situation, clearly. Still, important to see some of these scenarios actually play out. And it raises all the right questions: what should Airbnb do going forward? what should legal protections be going forward? should someone have seen this coming? and should they be held liable for it?

(edit: typo)

I'm not sure these are "never before seen corner cases". This kind of stuff is pretty much Landlording 101, and it's standard practice for someone engaged in renting a property to know about eviction laws. This person wasn't even engaging in what you might call the new, casual-sharing-of-personal-possessions style of rental, where someone rents their own personal apartment out occasionally while they're on vacation. She was just doing the old-school landlord thing: she bought an investment property she did not live in, and was renting it full-time for profit. That is a line of business in which you can buy and read books, customized to your state, telling you exactly the basics you should know about!

I think you're completely right, but it's worth noting that removing barriers to entry into existing businesses is a very viable business model. Even "buying and reading books customized to your state" is a barrier to entry that a company like AirBnB could help with (though they don't seem to want to go that direction).

But Airbnb, as a service, should at least filter/advise for knowingly stupid things like renting out for such an extended period.

If they're going to that effort, then why can't they filter for knowingly illegal things, like short-term rentals in cities in which this practice is illegal?

I don't see them doing either one anytime soon, since it presents a major PR/deniability problem.

They're pretty much knowingly illegal as a business model, but that doesn't mean they can't protect their own users from simple abuses.

This kind of stuff is pretty much Chauffeuring 101, and it's standard practice for someone engaged in driving for hire (through Lyft or UberX) to know about hack laws.

This kind of stuff is pretty much Retailing 101, and it's standard practice for someone engaged in selling items on the open market (through eBay) to know about business laws.

What's "disruptive" about all of these services is that they enable people who wouldn't ordinarily be willing to go through all the red tape and training to enter a previously specialized business, to do so with a few mouse clicks.

One could argue that all of these services (AirBnB, Lyft, eBay) are targeted at amateurs who want to dabble, but we all know that they make a significant amount of revenue from people who are using their platforms to run full-scale businesses, in many cases without securing business licenses, liability insurance, paying relevant taxes and fees, etc.

I don't know if I'd say that the services themselves are responsible, but they are certainly happy to take profit from high-volume vendors operating outside the law.

> In some ways, this is the dark side of disrupting established industries: legal protections aren't in place yet...

That's simply not true. The homeowner voluntarily agreed to rent her home to someone for more than 30 days. On the 30th day, that person became a tenant and gained certain rights under the law. The homeowner still has legal rights of her own, but the nature of the rental she agreed to means that she will have to engage in a more involved process to evict the tenant. If the homeowner did not want to deal with this type of scenario, she had every right not to rent her home for 30+ days.

In short, this has nothing to do with disruption or a lack of legal protections. Notwithstanding the fact that some AirBnB properties are being rented in violation of local laws and leases, AirBnB is simply a channel for marketing rental properties. The law already provides landlords and tenants with protections and obligations and every serious party engaged in the rental business is familiar with these laws. This story has everything to do with a homeowner engaging in a business she clearly knew nothing about.

> every serious party engaged in the rental business is familiar with these laws

AirBnB's disruption is to enable unserious parties to engage in the rental business, so the negative effects of unserious parties engaging in the rental business can pretty reasonably be laid at the feet of that disruption.

For really casual renters I can see that: I think the "couchsurfing for money" type of AirBnB really is new, and brings in casual renters looking to rent out a couch or a spare room, or occasionally a spare apartment while they themselves are gone.

But dabbling into full-time landlording, where you buy an apartment just to rent it out, is not really new or newly enabled by AirBnB. It's not like VRBO checks your sanity either; if you want to not pay attention to rental laws and get screwed on VRBO you could do that, too. Probably that has even happened, but nobody cares, because there's a cultural expectation that if you're renting an investment property on VRBO, you have an idea of what you're doing, and if not, that's your problem.

Yeah, maybe regulators will be able to figure out how to rein in the second use case without messing up the first. But that sounds pretty idealistic.

Airbnb,Uber,Kickstarter... shift all the risk on users/owners/renters/drivers/backers.

That's what make their business model very profitable.

Very low risk,they are not providing any real service but connecting 2 people,while still taking a good chunk of each transaction. "It's just a market place,just like an ad in a newspaper",at least,that's what they say.

So their business is not illegal per say.Only those who actually provide the real service face risks.

Airbnb makes it easier for naive or unsophisticated "landlords" to rent out their properties. Yes, those would-be landlords should educate themselves about what they are getting into. But you could argue that Airbnb, by dint of its existence and its success, is lowering the barriers to entry for the would-be landlords of the world -- and thus bears a social and ethical, if not necessarily a legal, responsibility to educate or protect those people from common mistakes. And besides, it's just good business to watch out for your customers.

The woman in question was not aware of the problems involved in 30+-day leases. We can fall back on the idea that she was ignorant, and that she got what was coming to her. True. But that's victim-blaming, and it's only half satisfactory. She is the kind of person who would not have invested in, and rented out, a property without the existence of a hand-holding site like Airbnb. Accordingly, Airbnb should do its part to ensure that people like her -- people entering the market because of Airbnb, and who are presumably unsophisticated -- are reasonably protected from rookie mistakes.

I don't think Airbnb is to blame here. I don't think Airbnb owes her any money. But I do think it should be thinking very carefully about how to retool its process, so that situations like these don't pop up again. Not for legal reasons, but for UX reasons. Airbnb operates a two-sided marketplace, and maintaining that two-sided marketplace means balancing the needs of both sides of the market.

It seems that Airbnb is offering to assist her with her legal expenses, and I applaud them for that. No, they probably don't have to do that. But "We don't have to" is a pretty lousy excuse to fall back on. Customer service matters, even if it means protecting your customers from their own mistakes (within reason).

If you read some of my previous comments[1] on AirBnB, you'll see that I question many of the company's practices. AirBnB has constructive knowledge that some of its "hosts" are violating the law in certain cities where it is well-publicized that short-term rentals are illegal. And it has constructive knowledge that there are virtually no apartment leases that permit renters to turn their apartments into hotel rooms through short-term sublets.

But this story doesn't fall into those categories and your line of reasoning is not convincing. From what has been published, the so-called "victim" purchased a condo hundreds of miles away from her actual residence as an investment with the intention of producing income through vacation rentals. She was marketing its availability on multiple sites, not just AirBnB. AirBnB and the current crop of sites like it didn't create the vacation rental market. This market existed well before the advent of the internet. Before AirBnB emerged, there was no shortage of unsophisticated individuals trying their hand at real estate.

Making the landlord a particularly unsympathetic character here is the fact that, in the original article about this situation, she admitted to seeing warning signs early on. Instead of terminating the rental well before 30 days had elapsed when her gut told her that there was something off about her "guest", she decided to let the guest stay.

There's a saying, "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered." I have absolutely no doubt that AirBnB could "retool its process" as you suggest and it still wouldn't prevent situations like this because no "process" is going eliminate greed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7896538

Fair enough critique of the woman in this story. Let's temporarily put aside the nature of her failings. I'd still describe them as naiveté more than greed, per se, but regardless, we can agree she has failings. She's not a very sympathetic protagonist. But let's talk about others like her.

Do you not agree that Airbnb is probably attracting a fair number of would-be landlords to the market who would not be in the market otherwise? Yes, the vacation rental market existed long before Airbnb. No, I don't buy the implication that Airbnb is only attracting people who would have operated in the pre-Airbnb vacation market. Clearly Airbnb has expanded the supply side of this market, at least somewhat by enticing new entrants into it, many of whom are probably unversed in the laws and regulations they should be versed in. That's not Airbnb's fault, but it is Airbnb's headache.

Regardless of our sympathies toward this woman in this particular case, she might be a canary in a coal mine. There are plenty of theoretical Airbnb hosts, and perhaps actual hosts, who could very easily take the plunge on Airbnb without coming to grips with the ins and outs of rental laws. They would assume, furthermore, that because Airbnb exists and thrives, then surely it must have sorted out the fine print.

Airbnb can take actions to prevent this situation from happening again. That doesn't necessarily mean blocking 30+-day rentals, or cutting back on the range of options one can undertake on Airbnb. But it probably means providing more information, at the very least, triggered by certain actions taken when posting a listing. Not because they have to, but because they know that their business model creates an "easy button" for a lot of unsophisticated users. That's a fine business model. But if you're going to do that, then you need to design prophylactic solutions to protect people from their own stupidity [greed/arrogance/naiveté/haste/whatever we want to call it in any given case]. You can't protect them from everything, but at the very least, you can learn and adapt as you go.

Not every PR hiccup deserves a complete redesign of the UX flow, of course. And no solution fixes every potentiality. So you evaluate the problems on a case-by-case basis as they emerge, estimating the likelihood that they'll happen again, and weighing the costs of a fix against the benefits. I'm not a fan of preemptively freaking out about possible edge cases. But when something like this happens, at the very least, you need to analyze whether it's a ridiculous edge case, or whether it's likely to happen again.

And who knows? Maybe this woman's mistake serves a sorting function, and the problem solves itself. Nobody will make her mistake again. Or so we'd hope.

The internet has created and expanded many markets. I am sure there are folks who considered the availability of services like AirBnB when making a decision to invest in a rental property, just as I'm sure there are folks who started a new business in part because they believed internet advertising would make it easy to reach potential customers. Should Google inform unsophisticated advertisers that they might lose tens of thousands of dollars on AdWords campaigns if they don't know what they're doing or overestimate response rates?

At the end of the day, you refuse to believe the simple fact that even if AirBnB goes out of its way to inform its "hosts" that their use of its service might subject them to certain laws, risks, etc., folks like the landlord in question will continue to click on your so-called "easy button" because whether greedy or naive, many people simply don't consider the possibility that anything bad can happen to them. Until it actually happens of course.

As I pointed out, the landlord here is on record stating that she ignored her own gut feeling about her tenant from hell after there were early indications he'd be trouble. If an individual presented with clear and specific warning signs that trigger an instinctual unease is willing to ignore such signals, why do you believe such an individual would make a better decision when presented with, say, a popup containing abstract warnings?

As for the idea that this story will prevent other such stories, the landlord in question is hardly the first landlord to have to deal with a rental gone bad and she won't be the last. Situations like these are not uncommon, and today's crop of real estate newbies makes the same mistakes that real estate newbies were making 20 years ago. The only reason this got any attention at all was that the so-called victim played up the AirBnB angle, which many people correctly recognized as being a red herring.

You seem to be confused about what legal protections are or are not in place, and whom the law protects. This isn't some loophole or edge case in the law, this is an explicit protection for lessee which is written into the law for a specific reason. "Legitimate slumlords", if you can tolerate such a concept, are well aware of this provision, and will bodily remove you and your belongings from their flop houses on the 29th day.

This is just an example of a person with barely enough capital to dabble in capitalism and lose. They thought they were going to flip a condo into rental income, skirted the law -- one wonders what other shortcuts were taken; did they have an occupant's insurance policy or a landlord's policy? did they take out a mortgage under the pretense of occupancy? Are they taking income tax interest deductions and claiming homeowner's property tax exemptions -- and pretty much got what they had coming.

"Did they break the law? Are they immoral heathens? I'm not saying that the answer to either of these is yes, but isn't it interesting that I'm the only one asking such questions?"

This post is really the ultimate in weasel-y, passive-aggressive muckraking. If you've got a point, make it.

It is unclear to me if one could pull the same thing at an actual hotel or not. Assuming you could find a hotel that had a room available for more than 30 days, would they book you for that long? Or do they already have a policy against that for this very reason? Or do they have some different protection under the law that makes it easier to make you leave when your stay has ended?

There are different rules for hotels/motels. In particular, if the manager has a right of access and control, and all of the following are true:

• occupancy of less than 7 days is allowed (this doesn't mean your occupancy has to be less than 7 days)

• a fireproof safe is provided for residents' use

• it has a central telephone service

• it has maid, mail, and room service

• it has food service provided by a food establishment on or next to the hotel/motel grounds and that is operated in conjunction with the hotel/motel,

then California classifies you as a guest, not a tenant, and no matter how long you stay there you can be kicked out as soon as you fail to pay, with no need for any kind of eviction proceeding.

More details here: http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/landlordbook/whois.shtml

These scenarios are why AirBnb can make money (IMO).

If you think about it simplistically, AirBnb sidesteps regulation. As a result, the biggest use-case for AirBnb is leases that are supposed to be against regulations.

AirBnb can't avoid messes AND regulations. Avoiding regulations is their profit model! With that comes messes. But that's OK for them- they have pretty successfully outsourced the risk to their hosts.

That's the thing that annoys me the most about Uber and AirBnb. They are no fools; they know what they are doing. And when you boil it down, what they are doing smells a lot like what the banks did running up to 2006- socialize the risk, privatize the profit.

What we must have is a network that enables a peer-to-peer trust rating for individuals. Sort of like Yelp, but for people.

No doubt such a system would be a huge privacy problem for people as people would say that negative reviews reveal their private facts, or that those reviews are defamation.

However, if the network is decentralized, then it might be possible to keep it running even in the face of opposition from state actors.

If we have a peer-to-peer rating/reputation network in place, it would allow people to bypass the elitist inside networks (old boys clubs) to raise capital from investors based on mass positive reputation.

Rascals and scammers like these failed Kickstarter bros would be shut down after a single scam ... they would not be able to rent or scam another person after a single scam.

Implementing a centralized reputation system would be a good first step.

I understand why Yelp and other established companies don't want to be in this business. Its a liability/privacy nightmare.

Imagine the first time some innocent girl in high school is unjustly called a slut, and is defamed by her own school as part of some bullying clique.

I believe the network can ameliorate if not outright prevent such clique abuse by enabling users to rate reviewers based on the reviews they have given. If you abuse people with your reviews and ratings, it can damage your own ratings.

something like the Stasi files? http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/stasi-files-revi...

Exactly wrong. Stasi files are held closely by the state.

This network would be public, and everyone would be able to see what the scum are up to.

If everyone had Stasi files, it wouldn't really be better.

Say again how many Yelp reviews are genuine and how many are planted by SEO outfits?

I doubt that 20 % of Stasi informers were double agents, if you led the Stasi on there were consequences.

It may be irrelevant to your analogy (it'd be more difficult to identify "personal bias" in reviews of people, after all), but the "20% of Yelp reviews are fake" meme is highly misleading. The study in question looked at what percentage of Yelp reviews were hidden, by Yelp, for looking "fake."[1] This provides us with little additional information on the percentage of visible Yelp reviews (which is what most people will assume you're talking about when you say "Yelp reviews") that are fake.

It's a bit like noting that 96% of Harvard applicants are rejected and concluding that "96% of Harvard students didn't deserve to get in," with the caveat that by "Harvard student" you mean "a student that applied to Harvard."

[1] http://people.hbs.edu/mluca/FakeItTillYouMakeIt.pdf

> Rascals and scammers like these failed Kickstarter bros would be shut down after a single scam ... they would not be able to rent or scam another person after a single scam.

the guys rans 2 scams on kickstarter. peer-to-peer trust rating networks wont help if a plateform does nothing to prevent scams at first place. that guys shouldnt have been allowed to run a second kickstarter even though he didnt deliver a product in the first one.

Wouldn't matter what Kickstarter allows or doesn't. People would look them up on our hypothetical trust network, and tell them to get lost after seeing that they are shameless.

Until such a system is in place I have a simple hack that has worked well for me - being googlable.

When you use the same name on all social media, have a domain with it, a blog on it, and openly invite people to google you if they feel like it ... and you aren't a complete arsehat, great things happen. Things like finding a place to live in SF become relatively easy, getting jobs/work becomes simpler, hell, even Tinder works better.

We already have the trust networks in place. Why are so few people using them is a better question.

That sounds horrific, and basically like a trial by popularity.

Count me out.

I'm not so sure. Privacy is a big deal for me, but I'd sign up to something like this. If:

If it uses a mechanism like CardSpace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_CardSpace) had:

=> I own my own data (client-side encryption on my client)

=> I consent to others accessing my reputation. Note that access means others can see, not get a copy of, and not keep.

=> I can withhold my reputation completely, or delete it at will.

In such a world, as Airbnb for example, I might make it easier for someone willing to share their reputation to rent a room. A non-existing or withheld reputation might require other checks (like a credit check), or verifiable references, for instance.

If thought through this might have uses. Primarily I'd need to know that it abides by the 7 laws of identity (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2006.07.7laws.as...). A lot of this technology exists. CardSpace is one example of a client app (I wouldn't use a web app to manage my reputation, but would be ok to use a service to let others leave feedback about me). Attribute provisioning in identity federation is another, and could be used as a mechanism to check someone's reputation, or to give feedback.

Something like this COULD work if done well. at the same time,it is also hard for one to protect oneself against identity thieft.But I guess this kind of public only social network could also be used by third party websites as an OAUTH provider. I post as little as possible on the web about myself in fear that others would use my identity for a scam.So if someone can fix that problem,it could be a killer product.

A system like this would still not account for outliers, nor deal well with temporal changes. People can be completely well behaved for long periods of time and suddenly really hit rock bottom. If you're the person who they are interacting with at the time, the trust system fails. Sure they get a lowered rating now, but then you have to ask the system, was this person who had a bad interaction being honest and how much of a ding is this to a long record of good ratings.

There's no catch all, even a single, centralized system wouldn't be very successful at dealing with the outliers in human behavior on top of the questionable honesty of the people adding ratings to the system in the first place.

http://signup.meowmeowbeenz.com/

Recent revelations show government agencies could manipulate online polls.

It would be trivially easy for them to poison this database.

> Rascals and scammers like these failed Kickstarter bros would be shut down after a single scam ... they would not be able to rent or scam another person after a single scam.

Well, you don't know they're a scammer until they've been to court and proved guilty or does no-one care about innocent until proven guilty anymore? And what's to stop them getting a new identity?

> Imagine the first time some innocent girl in high school is unjustly called a slut, and is defamed by her own school as part of some bullying clique.

That is a fucking awful example. You say "some innocent girl is unjustly called a slut" - this implies that if the girl was not innocent that it may be acceptable to call her a slut (as an insult). Then you say "[...] as part of some bullying clique" which implies that the problem is with the false accusation of sluttiness, and not with the fact that some bullying clique exists.

> I believe the network can ameliorate if not outright prevent such clique abuse by enabling users to rate reviewers based on the reviews they have given. If you abuse people with your reviews and ratings, it can damage your own ratings.

The clique just vote-rings and they cancel out bad votes. Or they buy votes off MTurk.

I don't have any problem with women or men having sex. I don't think the term slut is ever appropriate.

Bullying is always bad.

Hope I didn't piss you off too much. I just wrote that example quickly, without much thought.

I honestly don't understand how anyone could even begin to think such system is a good idea. We already have credit ratings, they are far less invasive than what you've described, they cover only one particular aspect of trust and they still suck. It will only get worse from there.

The only rating system I've seen that mostly works is Ebay. The only reason it works is because it rates clear-cut transactions that are limited in time and scope, and where both parties have something to loose. And even there you have problems, like its notorious bias against sellers.

Decentralized system would be even easier to game.

There's a startup that's trying to do this: https://myrepp.com/. Not sure why they're not using this case as an opportunity to get some press.

I'm pretty sure they don't allow users to rate one another though as the OP is suggesting. Instead it looks like you can create an account for yourself, verify who you are, and run criminal/sex offender checks against yourself. Then you can share your Repp profile with others (when selling on Craiglist, for exampe) so that others know you aren't a psychopath (or at least not a convicted one). It wouldn't really have prevented the squatter's issue unless the squatter has a criminal record.

I don't feel these guys are scammers at least when it comes to kickstarter. They have plenty of evidence to show that they have built something (even though it's incomplete).

I feel it's more accurate to label these guys as talented people who don't know how to manage a project.

As for AirBnB, the label is accurate. They're probably mining bitcoins as well since the electricity bill is so high.

My god, Airbnb is such a huge liability time-bomb.

All it's going to take is some tenant slipping on a wet bathroom floor or some other nonsense.

I hope they've squirreled away a huge legal defense fund from their last fundraising round.

edit

searched and found these, tip of the iceburg

http://www.sfbg.com/2014/04/29/lawsuits-target-airbnb-rental...

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/airbnb-legal...

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/06/18/airbnb_might_have_j...

http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/06/10/stabilized_tribeca_...

http://www.fastcompany.com/3027798/the-secret-to-airbnbs-fre...

There's legal and then there's moral. These scumbags lack basic human tact. I wouldn't ever think of doing something like this to somebody even if I were in the legal side of the law. I hope they get what's coming to them in spades.

Airbnb should do everything in their power to help out this poor owner or it will set a dangerous precedent for future hosts.

I'm not sure that it is legal to stay in an apartment after you lease or rental ends. It is just also illegal for the owner to force you out without going through a really complicated and lengthy process.

I'm pretty interested in the output of this lawsuit. But i think that Air Bnb, as it's kinda their business, would have spot such a big loophole in the law if staying 30d in a rental indeed gave people rights over the house-owner, no? I guess the guy is just trying to stay for free until the case is closed and cops are putting him out.

This is a bit of a tangent, but what would there be to stop the woman who owns the condo to start signing 28 day leases with hundreds of other people? Imagine if dozens of good citizens showed up to the apartment at once, with a key, any time they wanted. They could just hang out and of course they also had a lease and a legal right to be there, so the original two couldn't do much, could they? That would make it much less attractive to those squatters.

Could it really be that easy?

That would be illegal in any jurisdiction I know of. I'm renting my current apartment; obviously my landlord cannot rent it out to someone else while I still live here. Now you might say: but what if you're living there illegally? Well, I'm not, say I! Now we have a civil disagreement over property and a contract, which is a matter for the courts to decide. If the landlord alleges I no longer have a right to use of this property, despite possessing it in fact (e.g. because I am weeks or months late with my rent, or the rental has otherwise been legally terminated), they can get an order that I be evicted, which the police would enforce. There will be some kind of process, where I would have a chance to reply, for example by giving evidence that actually I paid my rent on July 1, and the landlord is mistaken in his allegations. If I lose and am evicted, then after that, the landlord can re-rent the apartment. But before that, they cannot.

"That would be illegal in any jurisdiction I know of. I'm renting my current apartment; obviously my landlord cannot rent it out to someone else while I still live here."

Right, you probably have a lease. If you had a squatter's lease--or a de facto lease--couldn't she just allow more squatters?

I don't think what you say has direct bearing on this situation because you both entered into a specific agreement. There is most likely the precedent of you paying the landlord money, which shows you both agreed to a set of conditions.

Since these guys are squatters, they probably default to a default "lease" as defined by law. So the fact whether they are there illegally as held by the landlord doesn't even enter into it.

It's not really squatting in this case, which is where someone takes up residence in a property they have never had a contractual right to, like building a log cabin on your farmland, and then living in it for years. That's a different set of laws.

This is rather a person who had a legitimate lease, but has violated or exceeded it. Here they clearly had a legal right to lease the apartment for the first 44 days: this lease was agreed to via AirBnB. And the renters paid the first 30 days of it. Now they refuse to pay for the remaining 14 days of the original agreement, and also refuse to vacate after 44 days. That falls squarely into eviction law: if someone previously had a legitimate lease but now the landlord alleges that they don't (because of nonpayment, exceeding agreed conditions, etc.), they can be evicted. How, exactly, depends on the country & state/province.

While it is less like squatting which I should have realized and I'm glad you that pointed out, I wasn't addressing that as much as I should have been. There was an arrangement for X amount of days, which they have overstayed, so I am wondering where California law falls there. Because now they are in a default lease, one exists on the lawbooks. It's enough of a differentiation to possibly give her a little bit more leverage. I wonder what the loopholes are that she could utilize to make life un-enjoyable for them.

Read the excerpts from California law that I posted in some other comments. IANAL, but the code is pretty specific to point out that the protections against harassment apply to "any lease or other tenancy or estate at will, however created, of property used by a tenant as his residence". As a landlord, I also have been told that judges have a tendency to dismiss eviction suits where there is substantiated evidence of harassment.

IANAL, but ...

Courts take a very, very dim view of any act that a landlord takes to harass a tenant, legal or not. Read http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~asucrla/Harassment%20by%20Your%... for example. A landlord who takes any adverse action against a tenant outside the legal eviction process is liable for damages.

Further, those other hundreds of tenants could have a legal claim against the landlord for fraud, since in a lease the landlord has to represent that he/she can deliver the property to the tenant, which is demonstrably not the case.

The most interesting part of the article, for me, is that they moved the nexus of their corporation from two tax free states to California. I doubt they realize the tax and legal implications of being residents rather than just visiting CA on holiday.

Am I the only one who thought about the McPoyle Brothers upon seeing the picture?

Could the homeowner not simply have her power shut off to hasten the removal of these pests? If they're game developers, they'd be dependent on electricity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_eviction

There is a sms exchange here [0] where he does in fact say he does require electricity, and if they cut it off, he will press charges for blackmail and damages.

Unfortunately it seems it will only be resolved with a lengthy eviction process.

It is also interesting that there problems within the first few days.

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-host-cant-get-squatter...

I wonder if a whole-house version of a lamp timer would be useful in this situation? Suppose there were a device that turned off power on a schedule, and which could only be reset from inside the apartment. Power would turn off automatically 12 hours after the lease terminates to "save power in an unoccupied unit."

That way, the owner isn't turning off power to constructively evict, but the power is off all the same.

"Pacific Heights", 1990 starring Melanie Griffith, Matthew Modine & Michael Keaton. SF based movie showing Michael Keaton abusing renters rights and even having the home owner arrested after turning off his electricity. Fantastic film, these guys (definitely scumbags) unfortunately might be in the legal right. Very unfortunate.

Harassment of a tenant, even a tenant whose tenancy is under dispute, is a crime in California. Disruption of power is specifically covered under the law.

See http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~asucrla/Harassment%20by%20Your%...

I hadn't heard of Confederate Express but their demo looks like a game I would totally play. Shame it's a scam.

I think along with the eviction route I would start trying to get them arrested for the kick starter scam.

kickstarter is scammer heaven

Totally.I wonder if someday backers could sue the plateform itself after a fraudulent kickstarter, right now this website is running faster than the law.

Honestly I expect that could kill Kickstarter. Backers can sue the creators and there is at least one lawsuit that has been brought by the New York Attorney General.

Not only that, they don't give a fuck because they get a cut no matter what and have carefully disclaimed all liability. For example, remember how they made a big deal about changing their rules on hardware projects to protect backers after several scams made the news in a big way?[1] They've now quietly removed all those restrictions to make it easier to list scams, er, projects[2]. After all more projects equals more dosh for them!

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/accountability-on-kickstart... [2] http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2014/06/04/kickstarter-ren...

IMHO Most backers are "religious" , in the sense it's spare money for them and they get some satisfaction in backing an idea,i really believe only a tiny minority of the backers really want a concrete product in the end ,otherwise I cant believe how some ridiculous projects could be backed 10xtimes the initial money asked. For businesses,backing something can be good PR too,a lot of business do it ,no matter what the outcome is.

People like me that are too paranoid or skeptical to give free money would never back anything to begin with.

I guess Airbnb got hacked, eh.

"Disrupted."

It's called disrupting the disruptor.

Moving fast and breaking the social contract.

Whatever happened to physically grabbing someone and violently throwing them out of your house?

See the previous coverage for the long version, but the tl;dr is that renters that rent for more than 30 days are protected as tenants by California law, including (normally proper) long drawn-out eviction proceedings.

Does that not mean you could live in the house too with a nice guard dog?

They probably could sue you for tenant harassment.

Please see: Pacific Heights (1990)

No, not if that was not under the original terms of the lease. You may own the building but in the eyes of the law it is the tenant's home and you can't throw them out onto the streets without due process.

Do you think Airbnb should make it difficult or impossible to put a room for rent for more than 30 days, then?

California tenant law contains a lot of examples of when your house isn't your house.

You cannot violently throw a tenant out of their apartment, because that is a violent crime. You can violently repel an intruder in self-defense, but if you have actually rented an apartment to someone, they are not an intruder. If, after first renting to them, you later believe they should leave—and they disagree—then you have a dispute about the terms and duration of rental. (It might be a really one-sided dispute in which one side is clearly in the right, but it's still a civil dispute.)

If their previously lawful residence has become unlawful (e.g. as a result of a failure to pay rent, becoming a nuisance, exceeding an agreed duration, etc.), in that case you proceed in a peaceful, legal fashion: you first give them formal notice that they are required to vacate the property; and if they fail to do so, you get a court order instructing the police or sheriff to remove them. The precise series of steps, and how many days they have to respond, varies by country and state/province (and may also depend on length of occupancy, usually shorter-term tenants being given fewer protections). You cannot yourself adjudicate and enforce the dispute, because vigilante justice is disfavored in most civilized countries. If, say, a client failed to pay your contracting bill for a job they owe you money for, you cannot walk into their cafeteria with a baseball bat, threaten the cashier, and seize the money that is legitimately yours. Instead you have to sue them in court, get a judgment, and then have the judgment enforced. There are ways you are allowed to enforce your legitimate claim, and ways that are... not allowed.

I see, so she will just have to co-exist with them.

No, she will just have to formally evict them.

If I was the owner, I'd be looking at all the possible ways I could to make their stay less comfortable - music at all hours of the night, faulty hot water system, power outages. Not very ethical, but what these guys are doing isn't ethical either.

That is clearly illegal under California law. In addition to exposing the landlord to civil damages, it's also a pretty clear way to get your eviction suit thrown out.

As I posted in another comment, see http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~asucrla/Harassment%20by%20Your%... for the details of the law.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/23/travel/airbnb-squatters/

a cnn story too,an interesting one.

So the guys ran 2 scams on kickstarter and is now scamming an airbnb host... well not really ,since he is just using the law against his host.

> Eviction procedures in California can be lengthy and complicated, often taking three to six months to evict a tenant.

http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-host-cant-get-squatter...

> On day one, after the guest checked in, he called her and complained about two odd things, Tschogl says. He didn't like the tap water (complained it was cloudy) and he didn't like the gated entry to the condo complex. He asked for a full refund, according to Tschogl. She had a bad gut feeling about him, she says, so she agreed to a refund.

This guy is really ...

EDITED:controversial expression.

> I would be the owner i would not ,care.I would break the door and a few windows.and camp in front of the condo/house,while waiting for the guy to leave.

It's probably really important that owners don't do this - renters (even terrible renters) have some legal protections and intimidation is a quick way to increase the legal costs and possibly end up in jail.

EDIT: Wait, did you put "nut case" in after I posted? I missed it before. Please would you consider using different insults? The person you're insulting doesn't care less about being called a nut-case, but by using such language you are subtly adding to the stigma faced by people with mental health problems. It's already harder for those people to get jobs or to rent homes, and one of the reasons is that people fear "unpredictable behaviour", and that fear is to some extent caused when we use terms to describe poor mental health to people who are displaying poor behaviour. This is a gentle request and you're free to ignore it.

The owner is doing exactly the right thing here: turn the media loose & Airbnb will hopefully cover her losses.

The scammer - Maksym Pashanin - is essentially trading what was left of his reputation for just a few thousand bucks. Heroin's a hell of a drug.

Edit: added scammer's name in case he uses some bullshit right to be forgotten on other articles.

I thought the US inherited all that "innocent until proven guilty" stuff from England.

We did, it applies to courts not public opinion.

the fact that he's using the law doesn't make it any less of a scam

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