New website helps catch illegal subletters

A new website aims to assist property owners in uncovering illegal subletting offers for their properties on sites like Airbnb and Craigslist.

Sublet Spy, based in New York City, claims to use the latest in military intelligence and online technology to analyze billions of data points to reveal potential sublet advertisements on a particular property, the new website stated.

“I started to see all these reports on the news, that there was all these illegal hotels [on Airbnb],” Sublet Spy’s founder, Ari Teman, said in an exclusive New York Daily News report. “It’s knowingly enabling criminal activity.”

Teman himself had his apartment wrecked two years ago after he put it on Airbnb only to find that a party had taken place, resulting in extensive damage, the Daily News added.

Teman’s new site charges landlords a monthly rate per unit to monitor websites for mentions of specific properties by using a software he created that finds clues to addresses using data such as pictures and posted reviews, according to the Daily News.

Sublet Spy, which advertises that it has teams in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and several international locales, reported that its staff is a mixture of intelligence professionals from the Israeli Defence Forces, Wall Street firms and academia.