UKDEB said:
I apologise if my tone comes across as judgemental, Jim - it certainly wasn't written that way. My question wasn't intended at a criticism, I'm just puzzled. From some posts earlier in the thread, I got the impression that no action was being taken because the perpertrator wasn't breaking any board guidelines. Perhaps I misunderstood.
First of all, I didn't take your comments as being even slightly judgemental. A lot of people are rightfully concerned about this situation and have legitimate questions.
No, you didn't misunderstand, but this thread has been going on for almost a month and in that time a lot has changed. At the time of the post you reference, it was not clear whether the person everyone was dealing with was just messed up...or a crook. No posting guidelines had been violated, and nothing
should have been done
at that point. Later, when it became clear that the person was not to be trusted, the DIS took appropriate steps to deal with the new reality.
One question we hear a lot is "Why was this person not banned?" First of all, I don't know (nor do I care) whether the person has been banned or not. Banning is a tool of questionable value in this situation anyway. It is always possible for someone to just assume a new identity and this person has used several screen names. In addition, if banning the person works you have lost a valuable channel of communications with that person. So, to me, banning was always a concept that had more downside than upside in this particular situation.
Maybe steps are being taken behind the scenes, but with new victims popping up and in the absence of any statements confirming that to be the case (I haven't read the thread beyond page 27 so I could well have missed some dialogue), it seems to the casual observer (me
) that nothing is being done.
That's an easy mistake to make, but sometimes you just have to have faith that good people will do the right thing. Just to give you an idea of the quality of the DIS response, I'll give you one example.
Dani's first post was at 9:38 AM, October 14. Prior to that post, she had contacted Doc to get some guidance to be sure she was not violating any posting guidelines, but Doc had no inkling of anything other than Dani's individual situation ...which initially looked like a communications problem. At 11:30 AM, I notified Doc that this person was the same person I was aware of being involved in an ongoing issue in another rental. At 11:54 AM, Doc replied to Dani and I with a list of steps he had
already taken to help try to resolve the problem.
Doc was on vacation at OKW at the time. I think 24 minutes is pretty good response time for a guy on vacation, and that has been typical of the DIS's response throughout. As I said above, there are some real issues here, but the DIS's response is not one of them.
Maybe steps are being taken behind the scenes, but with new victims popping up...
Well, as much as I commend those who came to this late and have waded through every word here, I think you have to realize there are a lot of things behind the scenes that have not been -- and probably will not be -- posted on the DIS. The devil IS in the details, and the details are not here.
As far as victims... This saga started on October 13 and popped up on the DIS on October 14.
Early afternoon on October 16, I received a PM from Stacey, gave her some suggestions, and by late afternoon we had clear evidence that her supposed reservation was bogus from the start. At that point, Dani was waiting for a promised refund of her money (which never came), so it was not until we established the truth in
Stacey's rental that we had a legitimate
criminal case for the police. Police departments are not collection agencies, and if we had approached the police without a
real case, they would have correctly referred the victims to a private attorney.
Local law enforcement in PA and NY were brought into the picture on October 17. As a result of their involvement, the post office refused to cash Sally's money order on October 19. Hopefully, the intervention of local law enforcement will result in Sally not losing her money.
We were aware of the post office confrontation when it happened on 10/19, but we didn't know the identity of the victim until she posted here. Also on October 19, another victim (goofynme) posted the story of a fraud he'd suffered a year ago, by the same person. So that's four, and there have been two other attempts that I'm aware of.
Since the incident on October 19, however, I am not aware of any further attempts at fraudulent rentals. I can't get into the details, but that date is important for a number of reasons, and
if anyone has any knowledge of attempts after October 19, any information about those attempts would be very helpful.
