Someone Rented an Airbnb, Then Secretly Re-Listed It as Their Own

• Scammers rent properties, then relist them without consent
• Others push guests to pay outside the booking platform
• RAJ was briefed on the scale by the JCF last year
• Property owners often don’t know it’s happening

Fraudsters are increasingly misusing short-term rental platforms like Airbnb in a specific, layered way, according to Roger Allen, second vice-president of the Realtors Association of Jamaica: renting a property legitimately, then illegally re-listing it online without the actual owner’s knowledge or consent, collecting bookings and payment for a property the scammer has no right to sublet at all.

Allen said the scale of the problem became clear to RAJ during a briefing from the Jamaica Constabulary Force last year, which walked association members through the range of booking-platform fraud officers were encountering. A parallel, more familiar version of the scam involves urging guests to pay outside the platform entirely: some of them are being urged to go outside of the platform to make payment and that sort of thing, Allen said, a request that strips away the fraud protections and dispute resolution the platform itself would otherwise provide.

The scam sits alongside a wider pattern of Jamaican real estate fraud RAJ has spent 2026 publicly warning about. In March, the association flagged a scheme where official For Sale signs were stolen from a legitimate Stony Hill listing, altered with a fraudulent phone number, and placed on an unrelated Portland property to mislead buyers, a scam only caught because someone familiar with the real agent noticed the discrepancy. In June, RAJ and the NHT jointly warned about fraudulent social media accounts falsely advertising NHT houses for sale, stressing that NHT housing solutions are never sold through social media at all. A St Catherine woman was separately charged in April for allegedly collecting $1.4 million for a property sale before it emerged she neither owned the land nor had it listed for sale.

The common thread across all four schemes, stolen signage, fake NHT listings, unauthorised Airbnb re-listing, and outright fraudulent land sales, is that each exploits a moment where a buyer or renter cannot easily verify who they are actually dealing with. RAJ’s consistent advice across every warning has been the same: verify a realtor’s licence through the Real Estate Board before paying anyone anything, insist on in-person meetings at verifiable offices, and treat any pressure to pay in cash or outside a formal platform as a red flag rather than a convenience.

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