Original Message:
Re: Membership requirements for potential renters ($9.99 fee) (by R P.):
You state that millions of people are honest and forthright. That is a truism, but on the other hand millions of people are scammers, criminals and crooks, and many of those people live to surf the net to lift email addresses from FREE sites in order to send their scams and spam. Once they get those email addresses they can sell them to other scammers. The required fee to communicate with renters and sellers on Redweek is to protect those listing ads from fraud. As a lister, that makes me feel much better to be a paying member of Redweek.
As he stated Redweek has records (email addresses and credit card numbers) in order to track down those committing fraud.
Randy put it very well below:
Third... yes... "tire-kicking" and fraud are less likely on our site. Most crooks are pretty lazy. They'll go where they can make free contacts too. If they pay to access members on our site they must use a credit card or a check, giving RedWeek a traceable link back to them. We did once shut down one member that used a stolen credit card within a couple of days of the purchased membership. And we contacted those that he emailed to warn them of the potential trouble. Can we catch all scams? No. But our paying members make up a much better community to work with than the free-for-all approach. We are concerned with fraud and even invented the Vacation Escrow provided now by a top-rated escrow company, First American Title.