In September exactly the same thing happened to me, but I luckily didn’t go ahead with the booking.

An apartment I liked the look of had a ‘special offer 20% discount – please contact’ with an email address in the listing. The apartment was owned by a user with several other apartments and hundreds of positive reviews so it all looked genuine. This was one of his new apartments so the discount seemed like a genuine offer.

I sent through an email and had lots of back and forth with ‘Paul’ who had perfect English and answered everything exactly how you would expect.

I said I would only make a booking via Airbnb and he said ‘of course’ and sent through a link exactly like you describe.

The page that opened seemed legit – all the links on the page worked (back to airbnb home page etc) and it had credit card details to fill in. I noticed ‘.slrv’ formed part of the URL after ‘airbnb’ but the only thing that set off alarm bells for me was that there was no Airbnb fee listed after the agreed price.

I had never used Airbnb before and like to think that I am extremely savvy with the Internet and scams. But I very nearly filled in my details.

Instead I sent a message inside Airbnb to the host Paul (the listing was still live, with the fake email address still showing within in on the App that I was using.) He was puzzled and said the apartment was available but quoted a completely different price. I asked if his account had been hacked and he confirmed it had but Airbnb had fixed everything the week before. I told him the fake email was still showing in the listing on the App (but it wasn’t on the web browser) so Airbnb has simply not bothered to change the listing on the App even though they knew! The real ‘Paul’ said he would contact Airbnb and I did as well.

All I got from Airbnb was their standard email about never completing a transaction outside of Airbnb. I emailed again and also spoke to an agent before finally a few days later the listing on the App was changed. There was no explanation, no apology, no thanks for pointing this out and persisting to get the listing changed so no one else could get scammed…

In the meantime the fraudster emailed me asking if I had completed the booking. I asked him to email me within Airbnb and that was the first time he said anything ‘suspect’ – he claimed he was abroad and couldn’t log into Airbnb as the system would block him logging in from abroad.

He again emailed me if I had done it (as he was so close to getting his money) at which point I told him I had and left it at that – I ignored his one further email to keep him sweating!

I assumed that I would be giving my credit card details (with name address etc) to the fraudster. Maybe that is the usual scam, or maybe they always follow up with the bank transfer like in your case. Either way I would cancel your credit card as well as they have those details.

In the end I booked a great stay with someone else. But having almost been scammed I think Airbnb have major security problems that instead of trying to make people aware of so that they can stay safe, they brush aside so people aren’t scared away from using the site. Of course there will be hacks and scams – but you can’t just issue the same stock warning about not doing transfers. This scam involves credit card details on a genuine looking Airbnb web page. I searched in Sep and there was literally nothing online about this so I hope your post and this reply can warn a few people about this scam (which I’m sure will still be going on.)