Maria on the grid

Aah, Toshi. I wondered when he'd get rumbled for being terribly shady. I stayed at one of his properties in 2008, where he was renting out apartments in a single block, or so his website claimed. My girlfriend and I were looking for a reasonably priced placed to stay in Brooklyn for a night and found his website with 3 or 4 nice looking apartments right near the subway. We book online via email and every piece of correspondence would apparently come from a different "Toshi Helper" who wrote in exactly the same style. Fair enough, just a little weird. We turned up on the day of our booking to a standard block building and got buzzed up to an apartment. Greeted by Toshi himself into a pretty nice looking apartment (apparently his own) with a hanging fireplace and a bank of refrigerators filled full of drinks in his lounge. He offered us a beer (we declined, it was about 10am), then ran through the terms of the property. He wanted the payment in cash and suggested we go back downstairs and up the main street to an ATM to get the full amount. After doing the 20 minute round trip we get back to his place, hand over the cash and expect to be taken to the apartment we'd booked in the same block. Well... apparently he didn't have any of those apartments available for some reason or another but we were going to be put in his "good friends" apartment in the block next door. We got walked around to a sketchy block with big metal cage doors, piles of dust and dodgy staircases. Of course, by that time we'd already handed over the cash and didn't really have that many options for alternative accommodation. The apartment itself was just about ok apart from being located in an absolute dump full of.. interesting residents. However, it was the classic bait and switch and I doubt the advertised rooms were ever available or at least oversubscribed many times. From the sounds of this article it seems like its not entirely surprising and on a whole new scale now. However, this doesn't appear to have anything to do with AirBnB per se. We got suckered with Toshi but it didn't really matter for one night, but as long as you check out all the reviews you can usually get a decent indication of whether or not the deal is good - certainly better than just a "company" website! Oh, here is the current version of the website with his apartment in the background. The beer fridges were just on the left out of shot.

TL;DR:

Not surprised, guy was sketchy.