Airbnb Users Are Turning Apartments into Sex Brothels

Renting your apartment out on Airbnb? Don’t worry so much about your stuff being stolen; instead, maybe freak out about whether your place will be as virginal as you left it. Prostitutes are using the online room-sharing site to set-up transient brothels.

According to the NY Post, escort services have discovered that it’s much more cost effective to rent an Airbnb apartment for one or more weeks than say, a room at a swanky hotel.

“It’s more discreet and much cheaper than The Waldorf,” said the sex worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Hotels have doormen and cameras. They ask questions. Apartments are usually buzz-in.”

The services usually rent out an apartment and then cycle through a number of clients during that time. The sex workers book the rooms themselves with their personal Airbnb profiles and then pay with a prepaid debit card. The prostitute above mentioned the New York City neighborhoods of the Financial District and Midtown West as hot spots, but a friend of mine in Brooklyn thinks their place might’ve had more action than they expected too. Some of the clues were left over lube and expensive camera parts.

Similarly, a Big Apple publicist named Jessica Penzari says she rented out her place from March 21-23 to a woman who said she was an army soldier who needed a place to crash between assignments. But when a sex worker was stabbed over a price dispute in the West 43rd Street apartment, the police called Penzari. She returned home to caution tape, baby wipes and a ten-pack of condoms.

Airbnb apologized to Penzari by paying for two nights in the InterContinental hotel while they changed her locks, cleaned her place and replaced all of her bedding. But this isn’t the first crazy story, last month Ari Teman rented out his place to a guy who said he’d be staying in the apartment with his family. But when Teman returned home early, he found a wild orgy happening in his apartment.

“This was just so bizarre,” said Teman, who had rented his apartment via the website Airbnb. “The worst part of the Internet right there was in my apartment. There were all sorts of people walking out of my apartment and people coming in from the back yard. It was a huge mess.”