These people sound like professional swindlers, you can buy someone's identity on the darknet for a couple hundred dollars at the most. They almost certainly filled out the rental application using someone else's information. That was implied in TFA.
Property ownership is very trivial to check. Calling city/town hall when a property is listed is not an unreasonable task for a multi-million dollar company, more like the bare minimum due diligence. If they can manage to send out professional photographers they can manage basic ownership verification.
Property ownership is public information that can be verified with the town.
Furthermore, I didn't see any reason to jump to such conclusions given in the article. These people seem like professional swindlers so they could have presented false documents when signing the lease.
Here's the deal: Tenants have rights because it's extremely easy for slumlords to take advantage of tenants - the power is completely in the landlord's hands without regulations. Poor tenant protections often leads to very serious negative externalities to society as a whole. History is filled with examples.
Unfortunately, tenants do take advantage of landlord-tenant laws sometimes, and that is terrible. Savvy swindlers can use the system to their advantage.
Being hard to recover money from individuals has absolutely nothing to do with landlord-tenant law and everything to do with the fact most individual people don't have tens of thousands of dollars sitting around to pay legal judgements. You'd have these sorts of issues anytime you sue someone else for anything. Best case scenario is that the person who you are suing has the proper liability insurance that will pay the judgement for them. (Liability is included with homeowners insurance and renters insurance but doesn't usually cover intentional actions)
I'm sure many of them will try to sue later on but that's not an overnight process, it can take years for a lawsuit to make it's way through court. Plus the property owners don't even fully know what their full losses are yet, it's way too soon, the dust hasn't settled. $20,000 is too much for small claims court so it's going to be a big production. Furthermore, these scumbags are the type of people to say "LOL" to a legal judgement instead of paying it. That means more time in court to get wage and bank account garnishments (if they are even working). If they don't have the $20,000+ or a well paying job or assets then the judgement is worth as much as the paper it is written on, you can't get blood from a stone. If you get a wage garnishment you may collect your $20,000 in 10 years if you're lucky.
(Ignoring the fact it's a several months process to even evict a tenant in many states in the first place.)
You can't let AirBnB off the hook here, they have the moral, if not legal, responsibility to prevent the most egregious abuses of their platform.
In this case 'SPG Member Exclusive' means 'a rate exclusively for SPG Members.' you're an SPG Member if you signed up for their loyalty program and got a member number.
For most hotel chains if you join the loyalty programs then when you log in and book directly you get the member price which is usually $10-20/night lower.
The air filter- It's just an electronic version of putting a box of baking soda in the fridge. See the video I posted in the comment you are replying to, its from the manufacturer and shows the setup.
The water filter- My fridge makes ice and dispenses cold water from one of the doors. This mechanism has a water filter.
Yes, absolutely, but it can be gutted for parts or rewired to bypass the API. The latter is not straightforward but someone did so in a video posted in these comments.
This is my fridge air filter - https://youtu.be/ziaCjNIPSCU all the new fridges have them now. It's literally just for filtering the air in the fridge, the high tech version of a box of baking soda. My HVAC system is steam radiators, which, thankfully, don't require filters.
I don't doubt that filters should be changed regularly but I don't trust LG to tell me when.
That is not how insurance works, or rather, people don't just insure against malice perpetuated by untrusted actors.
Example: Say I rent out my house and an electrical fire breaks out. Insurance company says "you were using the premises for commercial purposes at the time of loss and your policy does not cover commercial activity. We won't cover the fire damage." This is a very real possibility you'd find yourself in unless you specifically bought commercial/landlord insurance.
Sure, food recalls happen all the time. However, they are selling as a subscription service- they know what packets they shipped you. If there's a recall they should email you, snail mail you, and automatically issue you a refund on your credit card. WiFi is beyond overkill.
I wouldn't want to have my oven on when I am not home- it might just be me but it seems dangerous to leave a hot oven unattended. I always check the oven before starting it to make sure it's empty. I guess I am somewhat paranoid that something somehow ended up in there.
The rest of the stuff I, personally, don't see any value in other than energy efficiency and that doesn't really require networking. My fridge is constantly telling me that I need a new water and air filters but I just ignore it and assume it's a ploy to sell more filters (like printers that report you need more ink despite printing fine).
I don't have any idea what I am talking about? Every single pre-approval I got (3 different companies) sent me a dead tree paper disclosure in the snail mail that showed all 3 of my credit scores for each credit bureau, when they were pulled (month/year) and the algorithm used to calculate them (it was FICO 8 - I pay attention to these things). Perhaps they use a different score when actually underwriting but my pre-approvals used FICO 8.
Yes, there's plenty of people giving misinformation on the internet. You're giving very specific numbers out of thin air that are ridiculously inaccurate from my personal experience.
(BTW, there's a back door way to get your credit report as many times a year as you'd like rather than just annually)