NON- Verified & Protected Rentals

Has there been any history of scamming on Red Week Rentals? Looking at some rentals and some are not Verified and Protected. Understand that's what you want ideally, but in one circumstance that's all that is available? Does Red Week Protect the transaction at all? Or could you get scammed out of your money?

tracym481 wrote:

Has there been any history of scamming on Red Week Rentals? Looking at some rentals and some are not Verified and Protected. Understand that's what you want ideally, but in one circumstance that's all that is available? Does Red Week Protect the transaction at all? Or could you get scammed out of your money?

Scammers are rare on RedWeek, since RedWeek listings require membership and membership requires personal identification (which is provided in the process of paying for the membership). Scammers do not like to be easily found or identified or to "leave a paper trail", instead preferring sites like Craigslist, where they can operate completely anonymously. RedWeek is simply not an attractive option for scammers to scam. Scammers also don't want to pay any money to access a platform, becoming "traceable" --- still another reason that scammers avoid RedWeek.

That being said, there really is NOT much of anything that RedWeek does (or can do) to "protect" people from the unpredictable consequences of a non-verified listing / rental "gone bad", other than to boot the offending advertising member off RedWeek later (which obviously does not help someone who has already lost their money). Personally, I would never consider a non-verified listing but if you choose to do so, make every effort to have some direct "person to person" communications with that advertiser, to gain some confidence that they are "on the up and up" before parting with any money. If they won't document their ownership, or provide a phone number for a brief conversation, or speak with you at all, I would consider any such reluctance to communicate outside of "online" to be a bright red flag worthy of your concern.

Also, make very sure that any non-verfied listing advertiser demonstrates to your satisfaction that they actually own the week that they are advertising and not just trying to rent out a week that they obtained as an "exchange" from RCI or II. Both RCI and II clearly and specifically prohibit the rental of any weeks obtained from them by "exchange". A violating RCI or II member trying to rent out an "exchange" could lose their membership and you could actually be denied occupancy (even after having already paid for the rental) if any such prohibited transaction somehow became discovered. That's not a risk that I personally would ever want to take -- YMMV.

Proceed with caution regarding any "non-verified" listing. Get your own "verification" directly from the advertiser. If not able to do so, move on and look for other, less risky listings. Good luck!