“Airbnb has a secret cleaning crew to keep the horrors out of the press”

Airbnb has a secret team of 100 agents known as the Black Box to keep murders, deaths and sexual attacks in rentals out of public view, it is claimed.

Their methods have reportedly included paying $ 7million (£ 5million) to a woman raped during a stay in exchange for her silence.

The officers, many of whom have military or police backgrounds, are based in cities around the world, including Dublin, Montreal and Singapore.

They have a “blank check” for payments to support guests and hosts, and even have to clean up dismembered bodies, Bloomberg Businessweek has found.

The short-term rental giant spends around $ 50million (£ 35million) a year on payments.

In one incident, a rape victim received millions in exchange for agreeing not to “implicate any responsibility or liability” for Airbnb or its host after a “career criminal” used a duplicate key to enter a New York rental apartment and stab it in 2016.

The Australian, 29, and a group of friends collected the keys from a local store without showing any ID.

After a party, she came back alone to find the abuser Junior Lee, 24, hiding in the bathroom. The settlement was reached two years later.

Airbnb insisted, “In cases of sexual assault, in the settlements we have made, survivors can speak freely about their experience. This includes the case of New York.

In another case, American Carla Stefaniak, 36, was murdered by a security guard in an Airbnb apartment in Costa Rica in 2018 after telling friends the security was “brutal.”

Her family settled with Airbnb for an undisclosed sum after claiming they did not check the background of her killer, who was working illegally in the country.

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