In a somewhat similar vein, a few years back my wife got in to the whole Couchsurfing thing - which could be said to be a forerunner of AirBnB.<p>A nice couple from the other side of the world stayed with us for the weekend. When they left I noticed they had taken six Intermec Windows CE warehouse scanners with them. I'd been working from home for a bit so that why I had them, I was updating the software to work with our new ERP system.<p>They were backpacking so I'm not too sure what they planned to do with them. These devices are hard to hide and they didn't take the charging cradles.<p>I had to pay to replace them out of my own pocket as our home insurance wouldn't cover work owned items.
Though this is only tangentially related - door locks with digital codes really need to be the standard. I live in NYC and have never seen this here. Meanwhile, in South Korea digital code locks seem to be the standard.<p>Copying a key takes 2 seconds and costs less than a dollar. Giving your keys to someone is a huge security risk.
I'm surprised the police followed through with the information from the victim. I went through the same after being burglarized and I couldn't do anything because the detectives didn't care and/or were unreachable. This was in Houston though.
I wonder if thieves build up reputation on AirBnB before burgling. I know this is reasonably easy to automate on eBay (buy many lowcost items), but it seems AirBnB's reputation system would be harder to game.
"If you must leave these items at home, lock them in a safe that is secured to the floor of your home. Please remember that whatever is left at your home may be stolen, even if it is in a safe or hidden in a place you think nobody will ever find."<p>This is odd advice. Essentially: "lock your stuff up in a safe but that's likely not sufficient."<p>In fact, it's absolutely not sufficient because safes are rated based on how long it takes to get into them. If the thief is renting out a place which has the safe they'll get into it, especially since most people following the advice to lock their stuff up in a safe are likely not going to purchase anything stronger than a consumer grade safe, all of which tend to be fairly trivial to break into either covertly or through brute force given sufficient time.<p>The better advice would be to not leave anything of value, period. A safe isn't going to save your stuff.
* burgles.<p>I tend to ignore these types of news articles, of the format: "[Pokemon Go/AirBnB/Uber/New Thing] used in crime!". Crime remains the same, the landscape and tools change. Crime rates have been dropping for decades, and continue to fall, new technologies are not bringing in a new crimewave, although you wouldn't know it from reading some news sources.