Kaylee Sticker, who posts as @kayleesticker on TikTok, says she and a friend booked an Airbnb two months in advance, drove six hours to reach it, and arrived to find the owner telling them the property hadn’t actually been available for rent in four months. Her video documenting the moment has pulled in more than 1.3 million views and become one of the more widely cited cautionary tales about vacation-rental booking scams this year.
What Sticker Says Happened
“We booked an Airbnb two months ago, and they took our money, and we showed up to the house and apparently the owner said it hasn’t been on the market for four months,” Sticker said in her original video. In a follow-up post, she detailed how the situation was resolved: the platform booked them a second property, and by 11 p.m. that same night, offered a full refund on the original listing plus coverage of the price difference between the two.
How Listings Like This Slip Through
Fraudulent or outdated vacation-rental listings typically follow one of a few patterns: a scammer copies real photos and details from a legitimate property no longer being rented, a listing gets left active after a host stops renting the space, or a booking gets confirmed on a calendar that was never actually updated. From a renter’s side, all three look identical until the exact moment someone is standing at the front door.
Consumer-protection guidance around short-term rental bookings consistently points to the same red flags worth checking before a trip: a host who pushes communication or payment outside the platform’s official messaging and payment system, a listing with only a handful of reviews or reviews that all read as generic, and a price that sits well below comparable listings in the same area with no clear explanation.
What to Do If It Happens to You
Sticker’s experience turned out well specifically because she’d booked and paid entirely through the platform rather than a side deal with the host, which is what made both a full refund and a same-day replacement possible. Travel-industry guidance is consistent on this point: booking and paying outside the official app or website, even at a host’s request, forfeits most of the built-in protection a platform offers if something goes wrong.
The other practical step worth taking before any trip: a quick reverse-image search of a listing’s main photos can surface whether the same pictures are circulating under a different address or host name, which is one of the more reliable ways to catch a copied listing before money changes hands rather than after.
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