airbnb host "Quay Holidays" are imbeciles and / or scammers, and may be committing "Challis Extra Conditions After Payment Fraud"

Yesterday, I booked an airbnb accommodation for tonight in Poole, so I and another passenger could be in place for the ferry in the morning.

I have come to the conclusion that the behaviour of the host amounts to a fraud. They accept the money via airbnb's web site, and then start to impose extra conditions on the customer, hoops for the customer to jump thru.  They do have the ability to provide the service, but they would prefer not to, because then their margins are higher.  So instead of allowing airbnb to define the parameters of the arrangement, they ask the customer to jump through time-consuming and silly and dangerous hoops, and if the customer (victim) says no, they keep the money and refuse to provide the service.

I have coined the term "Challis Extra Conditions After Payment Fraud" to describe this general type of fraud, named after the two directors of the legal entity "QUAY HOLIDAYS LLP".

Suppose a business offers a service.  Suppose the business can provide that service if it really comes down to it, but would prefer to take the customer's money and not provide the service, and would like to intentionally provoke such a scenario, whilst maintaining plausible deniability.  The business can ask for prepayment for the service when an initial set of terms is understood between the parties to have been agreed, and take this money.  They can then start to impose additional conditions on the customer, saying that they can't or won't provide the service unless the customer meets these new conditions.  If the customer does not agree to these new conditions, then the business refuses to provide the service, but does not return the money.  If this situation came about innocently, it may be merely a breach of contract.  If the business intends from the outset to precipitate this situation and keep the money, then it is fraud.

Today, the airbnb host messaged me via airbnb asking for a mobile number.  They called and let it ring briefly.  I called back the caller id number from a landline.

They started asking me to email a picture of id.  I spend my whole life doing this sort of thing.  In addition, it adds no assurance.  Pictures of my id are everywhere, so of course the scammer would have a picture of my id.  The whole point of airbnb is that it vets both hosts and guests, so that this sort of crap is unnecessary.  So I said no, but I'm happy to show them my id on checkin.  Because it's hard to forge a physical passport, inspecting the physical passport would add assurance.  But they said they wouldn't do this; they want to leave the key in a box and have no contact on checkin (this is possibly where they're going wrong, fundamentally).

The employee said they would check with a director about how to proceed.

We then spoke again on another call.

Having reached an impasse, I said it was a pain having to change my plans, and being left in the lurch regarding accommodation, but I would probably let it pass, as long as they immediately made a full refund.  They said no, they are not going to cancel it.  It was at this point I realised they intended to keep the money, and I informed them of some of the avenues of recourse I would pursue, including airbnb complaints, refund via the credit card, civil claims against both their entity (which I now think is QUAY HOLIDAYS LLP) and airbnb, and complaints to relevant authorities including trading standards, the fraud section of Dorset Police, and so on.

They said okay, sounds like they would cancel it.

I sent a message on the airbnb app, and followed up an hour later with another call, because I hadn't seen a refund.

At 16:14 I got an email from airbnb saying a refund of 716 GBP was issued and should normally appear in my account within 10 days.

Note that in order to operate "Challis Extra Conditions After Payment Fraud", they do not have to keep the money every time.  They just have to tilt the odds in favour of being able to keep the money and not provide the service, capitulating with a refund if the victim causes enough of a stink, and providing the service for real if the customer is extremely compliant in agreeing to the new conditions.  These twin pieces of plausible deniability are part of what makes this such a nice little scam.  In this case, the fruits of the scam simply look, in the record, like now and again an airbnb customer simply "doesn't turn up" for the host QUAY HOLIDAYS LLP.  I can not prove that Quay Holidays LLP are intentionally doing this, and thus committing fraud, but I suspect that they are.  (They may merely be malignant imbeciles).  A person does not even have to admit to themselves consciously that they are committing this fraud, they just have to subconsciously find pretexts to not fulfil their side of the bargain, by inventing new conditions after taking payment.

For the record / searchability, the address of the accommodation was 906 Orchard Plaza. (This is not the address of the LLP).

For those reading from the future, 716 GBP(2023) was a fair old whack for two bedrooms of accommodation for one night, and if Quay Holidays really are just imbeciles rather than scammers, it's surprising they didn't want this money, but then again, under this hypothesis, they are indeed still imbeciles, so maybe it makes sense.

In addition, their employee said at the end on the phone something like "it's very suspicious what you're doing and good luck with the next place", thus choosing to insult me and become enemies.  Riiight, it's "suspicious" to be an airbnb guest in the vicinity of a ferry port.  I will have to see if I can find the energy to pursue them for costs, time wasted dealing with them, compensation for messing me around, any statutory fines that might exist for being imbeciles, etc.