The 'Airbnb for Escorts' Looks a Lot Like a Scam

​A new site that claims to be "the AirBnB for escorts" doesn't seem to be anything like AirBnB…or like a legitimate escort site, for that matter.

AirSnB—which stands for "Air Sexy Buddy," I was told— launched in December  and, according to owner Amir Mo, is supposed to be the escort industry's answer to the sharing economy.

"We're essentially the same as AirBnB in the sense that instead of asking for the service provider to pay us, we only request payment from the customer and we charge a percentage," Mo told me.

Mo said customers pay AirSnB upfront for a date arranged with their escort of choice (based on hourly rates). After the date, AirSnB transfers the money to the escort, skimming their percentage off the top.

Yeah.

Mo told me if there are any issues—like the escort doesn't show up or doesn't follow through on the pre-arranged details of the agreement—then AirSnB will return the money to the customer or give them a percentage back, depending on the situation.

But as if this didn't sound sketchy enough already, many of the escort listings on the site don't appear to be…real. Almost every profile I found was copied word-for-word from listings elsewhere on the internet.

Now, my personal website has the same blurb as my LinkedIn profile, so I thought maybe some of the escorts just recycle their copy around the web too. I reached out to a dozen women whose images and information I found on AirSnB as well as elsewhere online (usually they had their own personal site). Three responded to me and told me they did not post the information themselves and that it had been scraped from their personal sites. The rest did not respond by the time this story was published.

"It's not legit at all. I'm just now finding out my pictures are up there through you," one woman wrote. "Thank you for informing me. I just emailed them as well as my lawyer."

Another woman's assistant wrote back to tell me she had never even heard of the site.

"It is her information but we have never heard of this site so they poached her info from somewhere. Thanks for letting us know, we will need to have her info removed," she said.

Another woman, Alexandra Rayne, has several slick personal websites and was surprised to hear that her photos and description were found on the site. She e-mailed AirSnB after speaking to me and the page with her information was removed immediately.​

Rayne told me the site had actually reached out to her when it first launched, encouraging her to make a profile, but she wasn't interested.

Mo said he wasn't responsible for the phony profiles and that AirSnB was working to improve its verification process.

"We try hard to make sure that every profile is legitimate and real, so we added recently a new review and rating feature," he told me, though many of the profiles have vague, poorly-written reviews and even Rayne's false profile had a positive review attached to it. But Mo said they remove any illegitimate profile immediately.

"And even if there is still a non-legitimate profile, the money is safe with us, so if anything happens, the customer get their money 100 percent back," he wrote in a follow-up email.

Of course, it's not as if this is the only place on the internet where less-than-reputable individuals might use illegitimate p​hotos to seduce unsuspecting victims. But the combination of a preemptive money transaction and the systematic repurposing of escort's information and photos is troubling. Meanwhile, the online escort industry already functions much like sharing economy sites, empowering escorts to do business directly with their customers using apps like Snapc​hat and sites l​ike Craigslist. Escorts don't need AirSnB…but apparently AirSnB needs some escorts.