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so they pivoted to insurance fraud detection?

[you can downvote this to your little gung-ho-yc heart's desire, but the problem won't go away as easily]



I don't know why you got downvoted, but yes, insurance fraud detection is gonna be a significant problem for them now, especially since they don't have any expertise in it.

No doubt they'll need to hire some claims examiners. But if I say "omg, the person who stayed here last night has run off with my $30,000 necklace" then what evidence do I have to provide?


But if I say "omg, the person who stayed here last night has run off with my $30,000 necklace" then what evidence do I have to provide?

A police report, at the very least.


The guarantee is probably handled by pure insurance companies, who have been dealing with fraud successfully since before the Code of Hammurabi.


Is a big insurance company going to be willing to insure people that are illegally subletting their apartments?


last I heard, they are still shopping around for insurance companies and that was at lunch today.


Are you sure?

In a low-fraud world, it's probably cheaper for airbnb to insure against it themselves than to outsource that to somebody else. You don't insure against a large number of small losses, you insure against the possibility of one big loss -- this is why you buy car insurance but Avis doesn't.


At least in the short-term there is one big risk for them: They don't know how many users will claim that there have been damages. So they don't really know how much this insurance will cost them.

By outsourcing the insurance to an insurance company it's not their problem. It's the task of the insurance company to assess the risk and Airbnb knows beforehand how much it has to pay.




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