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Scammers who make a living by scamming Airbnb.com Customers have a powerful new tool: a software offering as a service called "Earth lordz, "Which automates the creation and management of fake Airbnb websites and sends messages to announce fraudulent ads.
The individual who created the account below pays $ 550 per month for a Land Lord Landlordz basic plan subscription.[.]site that helps him manage more than 500 scam properties and interactions with up to 100 "guests" (soon to be scammed) looking to book fake ads. Currently, this scammer has only four dozen listings, almost all of which involve properties located in London and the United Kingdom.
The Land Lordz administrative group for a scammer who runs dozens of Airbnb scams in the UK.
Your typical victim will respond to an ad for an ad provided on Airbnb.com and will be assured of being able to pay via Airbnb, which offers buyer protection and refunds to disgruntled customers. But when the interested party knows about the list, it receives a link to a site that looks like Airbnb.com but is actually a phishing page.
In the case of these particular fraudsters, their fake page was "airbnb.longterm-airbnb[.]co[.]United Kingdom"(I've added brackets to prevent the click from clicking on the link). The site looks exactly like the real Airbnb, includes images of the requested property and directs visitors to login or creating a new account. The fake site simply forwards all requests from this page to Airbnb.com, and records all usernames and passwords submitted through the site.
The fake Airbnb site used by the fraudsters has recorded all the Airbnb credentials submitted by new and existing users.
Here are some of the properties offered for rent by these crooks. All names and images on these lists have been removed from other legitimate lists.
False properties for rent listed in the Landlord Airbnb scam service.
The Land Lordz service includes several sets of positive comments by default of old fake reviews that can be used to populate phony lists. The non-existent house and apartment rental offers offered by these crooks are all sold at the monthly rate, and the seller's page states that buyers must pay a security deposit the month before the expiration date.
A bogus comments generator page.
The Land Lordz panel allows the scammer to keep track of all messages with potential victims, who are chained and informed that the residence reservation will be lifted unless a cash deposit is paid within 72 hours . Here is one of Shanon, victim of March 28, 2019, fraudsters.
Shanon: My partner wants to see the place before sending money as we did last time and someone scammed us. I am not saying that you are not legitimate because you have sent documents with details of the name, etc.
Scammer: "Hello, the property is always available for your dates. The price is 250 € + 500 € deposit. Since the security deposit needs to be added, a discount must be applied, please follow the airbnb "link (which refers to the Airbnb fake page).
Alex Holden, security information officer of Hold Security LLC and the researcher who shared the screenshots of this fraud panel, said the fraudsters appeared to advertise their fake ads primarily via Gumtree, a free classified ads service UK.
People who lose money in these scams fail on two counts. First, they do not notice that they are not on airbnb.com. More importantly, they end up cashing money to get the promise of a fake apartment or a house in another country, and thieves cut off all communications at that time .
As they did to this poor miller, who paid $ 1,200 in exchange for a paper that promised them to hand over the keys to the apartment on a specific date:
The subject of this victim's message, "picking up the keys," says it all.
This 2018 story from the travel blog goatsontheroad.com tells the story of a couple who was almost scammed by a trap resembling Land Lordz, before his wife realized that they were no longer on airbnb.com.
It is important to note that these scams can target Airbnb users as much as other services, such as craigslist.com and booking.com. Be wary of e-mail links from web hosts and be sure to always be on Airbnb or on the site you think you are on.
Airbnb could help by adding a robust type of authentication to several factors, such as security keys, that would eliminate these Airbnb phishing pages. According to twofactorauth.org, Airbnb does not currently support all type of multi-factor authentication that users can enable.
Airbnb.com states that if the company detects a connection problem for your account, it may ask you to enter a security code sent to your phone or email address or to verify certain information in your account.
In case anyone would like to follow up on this research, the other areas used by these fraudsters include: airbnb.longterm-airbnb[.]co.uk, airbnb.pt-anuncio[.]com, airbnb.request-online[.]com, and airbnb invoice[.]com. Some of the bank accounts and recipients of payments from scams related to these lists are illustrated here.
Tags: Airbnb scam page, alex holden, goatsontheroad.com, Gumtree, Hold Security LLC, Land Lords, Land Lordz
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 14th, 2019 at 14h40 and is filed under A Little Sunshine, Web Fraud 2.0.
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