4

You Can Use House-Sitting Sites To Rent Out Others' Homes

While concerns about coming home to a fully Saran-wrapped murder room usually top the list of Airbnb worries, some criminals are more subtle. It was pure luck that tipped off one San Francisco couple -- they were on their way to Burning Man when some friends emailed to say they were staying in their apartment. The friends had rented the place on Airbnb and realized they knew the owners when they recognized the photos on the walls.

What a fun coincidence!

Or at least it would've been, if the couple had ever rented out their place to start with.

Torroid/flickr“Everybody shut up for a minute. I’m trying to deal with a real estate problem.”

They had used a site called Trusted Housesitters to match them with an "experienced sitter," who would take care of their cats and look after the place while they were gone. The sitter routinely listed the homes he sat for(?) on Airbnb for a double profit. Naturally, the couple were outraged. They wanted to pay a stranger to stay in their home, not have some strangers pay to stay in their home!

Airbnb is rife with similar scams. Some people rent your house for a few days, then list your rooms for long-term rent on Craigslist. The scammer holds a bunch of viewings, takes deposits from every college kid he can find, and then hands the house back over to you. Two weeks later, 40 dreadlocked white kids show up and start unloading minifridges on your lawn. Basically, there may be some security issues with allowing strangers to enter your home when you're not there. Please, try to contain your surprise. Continuing with this thread ...

3

You Can Steal Your Rental Host's Home With Squatter's Rights

In October 2015, UC Berkeley professor Elizabeth Abel rented out her home while she was away on a research trip to Paris. She used an Airbnb-like site called Sabbatical Homes, which provides rentals to and from traveling professors, reasoning that there is an "implicit degree of trust amongst academics." Feeling secure in the knowledge that she was renting to a fellow professor from Sarah Lawrence, Abel left the country.

Then the rent stopped coming.

When Abel returned home, she was prepared for a confrontation. What she did not expect was to find her house boarded up and its entire inside relocated to the outside. The tenant had planted his flag and refused to surrender, and there was nothing anyone, even the police, could do. Since he'd been there so long -- five months, to be exact -- he had established squatter's rights, and therefore a legitimate legal claim to the residence.

SaidieLou/Wiki CommonsShould have rented to an Arizona State professor. Worst they give you is a living room filled with beer cans and a broken toilet.

All Abel could do was move across the street and watch this creep live in her house rent-free. It took a full year before she could finally cross back over into her own home, but not before fighting a libel case that the squatter had filed against her in which he claimed that his character had been defamed by ... well, his own actions, we suppose.

So what class did the freeloading professor teach? "Ethics and Politics of New Technology."

Somebody please help the abstract concept of irony. It just fainted.

2

You Can Destroy A Carefully Planned Traffic System With Ridesharing

When ridesharing services first started up, the carless were ecstatic. "Finally, there's an alternative to the exorbitant prices and awful service of our local taxi company. Uh ... besides the bus, of course."

Maybe that's why from 2013 to 2016, the average annual revenue for a taxi driver fell drastically, from $88,000 to $69,000. But people lose jobs to automation and outsourcing all the time, right? The march of progress can't be slowed just because a few cabbies went from making three times the salary of your average teacher to only double, right?

Right.

1

You Can Donate To Crowdsourced Charities ... At The Expense Of Real Ones

We now have multiple crowdsourced charity sites to choose from, and surely that's a better system than traditional charities, right? One that cuts out the middleman and gets your money straight to the people in need. But here's something surprising: People who work for nonprofit organizations have their jobs for a reason.

Giving money to charity is a legitimately wholesome thing to do, nobody's arguing that. However, we aren't very good at distributing the funds evenly on our own, thus creating an inequity wherein popular pages rake in more cash than they need, even as others are ignored. Meanwhile, the Red Cross doesn't dole out blood based on numbers of retweets.

Mediaphotos/iStockThat needle doesn’t go in your phone.

So when we use crowdfunding sites to donate to disaster relief, we are throwing more money at a problem that could be better solved by supporting established crisis efforts, while also creating an opportunity for scammers to abuse the system. And all because it makes us feel more personally helpful to click on somebody's name rather than send a quick text to some anonymous charity number. We aren't saying that you shouldn't donate to fundraisers, of course. But make sure you do your research, and don't forget to support charities for the other 85 percent of the year, when people still need help.

Follow Mike Bedard on Twitter @TheMikeBedard to stay up to date with all of his projects.

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