Investor Tricked Into Buying $1 Million Of Fake Airbnb Shares

Some frauds are supersophisticated, taking months of research to bypass businesses security mechanisms and finding the right bank account to drain. Other times, all it takes is a convincing telephone call, an alluring offer and some persistence.

In a court document unsealed this weekend, it was revealed that back in October 2017, a fraudster posed as an employee of an international asset management company and offered an investor the opportunity to buy pre-emptive right of shares of Airbnb, three years before the vacation rental marketplace actually went public.

The unnamed victim was convinced and first sent over $40,000 in return for those promised shares. In December, they sent another $40,000. And over the following months, up to February 2019, they transferred another $990,000.

That February, just after they had sent the largest sum of nearly $180,000, the victim visited the offices of the unnamed asset management business with whom they thought he’d been dealing. That was when they received a nasty surprise: It was all a scam and they hadn’t bought any pre-IPO shares.

In December 2020, Airbnb went public, hitting a trading-day high of $165 per share and a market cap of $103 billion. It’s now at a $126 billion market cap and shares are selling at $201, which would have made any pre-IPO investor happy. But the victim had no stock.

They tried calling the number of the apparent asset manager. The phone line had been disconnected. In January this year, they turned to Swiss investigators to help, indicating they were a Switzerland-based investor. No more information was provided about the victim’s identity.

The Swiss police have asked for the DOJ to help it investigate some of the money transferred to American banks. It’s unclear whether they’ve had any success in helping retrieve some of the stolen funds. The fake asset manager’s identity remains unknown.

It wasn’t the only time an investor was tricked into splashing on pre-IPO shares at Airbnb. In 2019, Forbes reported on the case where multiple investors were duped into paying $2.1 million for fake shares in not only Airbnb, but also Lyft, Palantir and Uber. The fraudsters scored all that cash in just four months between October 2018 and January 2019.

That was a smash-and-grab in comparison to this latest case, which shows how persistent the tricksters can be. 

Investors should be aware that, typically, only employees and venture capital investors would hold stock in a pre-IPO company, though the startup boom has led to some buying shares directly from current and former employees of hot tech companies.

A version of this story will appear in my weekly newsletter on cybercrime and surveillance, The Wiretap, where you’ll find the relevant court document. You can sign up here for exclusives and all the security, intelligence and privacy news you need to know today.