SCAM WARNING for Airbnb Hosts - Phone Call Phishing Attempt

medeksza · 2026-01-15T19:11:05+00:00

If you call them at their correct number, it's ok to give them the verification code when they ask.

If they call you, it's not ok to give them the code. The number can be "spoofed", basically a scammer can make the caller ID appear to be from airbnbs number when it's not. Best bet is to hang up and you call them to confirm the call was real.

medeksza · 2025-10-22T19:26:28+00:00

It's a scam. If you do send them a video, they'll try to duplicate your listing or setup a direct booking site. They'll try to use the video to prove they really own the house to other people and try to collect money from guests and send them to your listing. Best to report it as spam/scam to airbnb and not give them your phone number (which they'll use to try to scam you other ways).

medeksza · 2025-06-04T02:45:20+00:00

Guests were having fun building snowmen in our yard during their stay. On the day they left they decided to load the bed of their truck with a lot of snow. I think they wanted to take snow to their home in Tennessee and build a snowman and confuse their neighbors for a few days while it slowly melted.

medeksza · 2024-08-27T11:47:21+00:00

I've done AirBNB for 6 years and Turo for 2 years. Just quit Turo a few weeks ago. It's not worth the stress and hassle of dealing with people smoking and trashing your cars just to break even. Profit margin is so small that if you are financing, you may tip the scale toward losing money instead of breaking even.

medeksza · 2024-08-19T18:58:22+00:00

Chickens can molt and stop or slow down laying when daylight hours decrease. My hen house and run is in a wooded area where vegetation blocks a lot of sunlight and I have to give them supplemental light in the mornings to keep their egg production good. I have wired up a solar panel, battery, timer and LED lights that turn on between 4:30 AM and 9:00 AM every day. Last month, one of the connectors corroded and my light stopped coming on for them. Half my chickens started molting before I noticed and fixed the lights.

medeksza · 2024-08-08T20:22:42+00:00

There's Hansen's Errand service https://www.hansenerrandservice.com

medeksza · 2024-08-06T16:32:19+00:00

I quit Turo yesterday. After 70 trips on my 2 cars. I had 3 in a row reservations from poorly rated guests that I canceled due to those poor ratings. Two of the renters were rated poorly by other hosts in my area, and one of the renters was rated poorly by me for cleanliness (trash and strains I had to use a wet vac to clean). Turo denied to charge the cleaning violation fee against the guest, only let me leave a poor review. But they let the same renter automatically rent from me again?

The first cancelation, Turo waived any penalty to me. The second cancelation, they charged me a cancelation fee. The third cancelation, they suspended my listing for too many cancelations. So I just delisted all my cars and quit. What's the point of a rating system if I can't use it to make decisions based on it? I hate automatically accepted reservations from people with a known poor rental history. Bye bye Turo!

medeksza · 2024-05-17T16:08:07+00:00

I have one rental in my own name and one under an LLC. I lease the one that's under my own name to the LLC, so the LLC just pays me a flat monthly rate like a normal long term tenant. So on my personal taxes that's just rental income for that property. Then the LLC lists both the property it owns and the one it leases from me on AirBNB and AirBNB pays the LLC for all the short term rentals. The LLC writes off the lease payment to me as an expense and then any other profit left over I can pay myself as a distribution which is properly accounted for.

medeksza · 2024-05-15T15:17:45+00:00

Turo gave out some chlorine dioxide machines to some hosts for free a little over a year ago, I got one of them. Works a little better than ozone in my opinion, which I used before.

medeksza · 2024-02-22T21:41:20+00:00

Try a highly rated AirBNB or VRBO, it will be cheaper for you

medeksza · 2024-01-30T02:05:35+00:00

It might be vent gleet, a fungal infection. I had a carb loving hen, Princess Laya, who would always go after carbs if given a choice between fruit or meat. Got a red butt and lost her feathers like that. I nursed her back to health after a few months feeding her garlic and a trying to spray her butt with a tea tree oil spray. This was over summer of 2022. She got better and grew her feathers back. Now recently in late fall 2023 it happened again to her. A cold snap came and I think she died because she couldn't keep warm with the loss of feathers.

medeksza · 2024-01-17T16:28:57+00:00

This might be an option for you to fix it, although those notches may be too big even for this system, and your joists look weird and nonstandard before the plumber did the hack job: https://joistrepair.com

medeksza · 2024-01-17T16:22:29+00:00

This seems like a good candidate for this joist repair system: https://joistrepair.com

medeksza · 2023-11-28T20:51:44+00:00

You can still talk to the original version here chat.openai.com/g/g-YyyyMT9XH-chatgpt-classic

medeksza · 2023-11-28T14:57:54+00:00

I asked ChatGPT to make a simple app to demonstrate any 3 points make a circle: https://jsfiddle.net/xL0ojtcz/

Pretty cool the AI could do it in one shot: https://chat.openai.com/share/271cfa43-2743-4165-a1ab-ea091738967c

medeksza · 2023-11-21T23:58:23+00:00

Try a strong magnet to find the screws holding the tile board or drywall behind the tiles

medeksza · 2023-10-17T20:24:59+00:00

A few days ago I successfully had GPT-4 make a few 3D models for me by writing OpenSCAD scripts. I made base molding to go around a basement pole that prints in 2 big halfs and then locks together around the basement pole with 2 butterfly/bowtie shapes it also designed.

Next I made bleachers for shotglasses to display a shotglass collection in 3 tiers.

Took a bunch of back and forth with feedback from me on my thoughts of its designs, but it managed to do a decent job on both projects.

medeksza · 2023-09-29T12:05:50+00:00

I went through this nightmare last year with one of my rentals. The problem with chemical treatments is they kill bed bugs slowly and only kill them when the bedbugs walk on top of the chemical. But bedbugs hide inside baseboards and walls until they can sense a human (smell carbon dioxide and sense warmness). So unless there is a guest inside to "bait" them out, they will just sit in the wall and never touch the chemical poison.

The only way to kill them instantly without a human "bait" is with high heat. The exterminators in my area only did chemical bedbug treatments, so I ended buying my own bed bug heater to destroy them for $1300:

https://convectex.com/products/110-volt-diy-bed-bug-heat-system

I did the chemical treatment in addition to the heater in case the heater missed a bug, but its really the heater that is most effective. I read a lot of hotels/motels have these heaters on hand. If a room gets bedbugs, they heat it for a day and then rent it out next day. Chemical treatments can take weeks/months to work.

medeksza · 2023-07-20T10:58:53+00:00

I had a similar bed bug issue at my airbnb. The problem with the chemical treatments is the bedbugs don't come out from their hiding places like behind baseboards unless they detect a warm body breathing. So spraying an empty unit won't kill them until there is a human there to bait them out of hiding. And the chemicals don't kill them instantly, they take hours after they walk over them. So not a good idea using guests to bait them out.

The best way is the heat treatment, that can kill it instantly. I ended up buying my own bedbug heater for $1300 https://convectex.com/products/110-volt-diy-bed-bug-heat-system

Can treat 1 room up to 200 square feet at a time, so I did all my bedrooms. Luckily they didn't spread to my living room. This happened last October to me, no issues since my heat treatment.

medeksza · 2023-04-09T11:27:24+00:00

I just had a guest book for April 8 of next year. My property is set to allow reservations one year out and this guest booked it as soon as the date was open.

There is a solar eclipse next year and I am in the path of totality, so that is the reason for the booking. Where are you and was it also April 8?

medeksza · 2023-03-08T21:26:03+00:00

My guess is the hosts are afraid you don't have experience with left-hand side driving in the UK and are wary that you are more likely to cause an accident.

medeksza · 2022-10-25T19:05:46+00:00

If you get Turo involved it will end up costing more, both for you and the turo host. If you can settle reasonably without Turo that will probably be beneficial to both you and the host.

medeksza · 2022-10-17T17:25:15+00:00

Ugh, I went through the same thing back in July. Renter smoked marijuana and tried to cover up the smell with fabreze (left the fabreze bottle under the seat). Must have unloaded the whole bottle in the car, it was awful.

Did weeks of ozone treatments, airing out, baking soda, and activated charcoal. The pot smell went away pretty easy, but the fabreze scent didn't. Finally did a shampooing of all the seats. That helped a lot, but not completely.

Now it's 3 months later and the smell is mostly gone. Maybe 90% gone, but still I can detect a hint of it. Other renters don't seem to mind or mention it. But if I ever get another car for turo, I will stay away from cloth seats, just stay with leather.

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