Just getting into some of the depth around how some of the listing sites work. I've certainly had a high noise to signal ratio on HL and am just about to embark on a subscription to OD which i'm sure will drive more spam my way.
Anyhow, what i didn't quite get was the purpose of spam / scam enquiries. Is it initiated by the listing sites to help them drive perception from customers around volume of enquiries, or do they have a more dubious purpose?
4 newly ordained priests from Greece will send you a cheque/bankers draft for £5000 or some such figure way above the cost of accommodation which you will be asked to cash and then send them back the balance. You bank the cheque and in 4 or 5 days your bank will show the cheque as 'cleared' and you send the priests back £4000 or some such amount. About a month later your bank will phone and break the bad news that the £5000 draft was actually stolen or a forgery etc. You've lost £4000 and the scammer, masquerading as 4 newly ordained priests, will be happily spending your hard earned whilst churning out more emails from down town Lagos.
There are variations on this theme, all designed to trap the unwary into parting with handfuls of cash.
Oh and HL aren't all bad. I signed up in December last year and they work OK for me so far.
Some guests just need a sympathetic pat. On the head. With a hammer.
The other important one is (and sorry if I'm teaching my grandmother to suck eggs):
You get an email purporting to be from a guest with a link for you to click on to "see our full booking details/requirements/" whatever.
Of course you've never heard of the guest, but you're momentarily confused so you consider clicking on the link. Don't. May be a virus, or a fake log-in page to steal your password/s.
Same with any email purporting to be from your listing site asking you to synchronise your account. If in doubt, check with your listing site, by phone or email.
As you probably know, all this is simple precaution and applies to any unexpected email, not just related to holiday lettings...
Having said all this, I don't think I've ever had a scam through OD....
I think i may be off to the drawing board to try and put together a web based tool to help people try and discern the authenticity of someone from an email address. We've got a quite neat tool we use at work for this purpose already so a nice side project for me to get to work on with one of our developers i think!
