Another reason why homeowners need to do their own vetting when using Trusted Housesitters
This story made the official forum recently: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/conwoman-stole-house-sitting-sentencing-snb8s0jfs Summary: A con woman in England signed up for Trusted Housesitters and I guess passed the ID check, and did her thing for a while and is finally be brought to justice.
I know people have a lot of "feelings" about these incidents including the feeling that the company somehow isn't resonsible, or that the "free housesitting" model itself is. I beg to differ given their advertising, recruitment, and the fact that they do no real vetting of memebers either sitters or hosts and yeah I'm including the US-background check for sitters in that. While incidents might always happen, I think there are various ways the number of incidents could be lowered/ These changes would involve both some kind of vetting for membership (both sitters and homeowners), getting more private feedback to the company since so many are reluctant to say things in reviews, maybe using AI to aggregate reviews an private feedback reported to the company to look for problems, clearer advertising that the site is a matching site so users really need to vet, and tools to help them do this.
So posting this maybe because I think existing members and potential ones -- both sitters and hosts need to know what's happening.