Band together with your new friend to take both parties to small claims court.
Argue the representations made on their website were misleading and induced you into using the service. That due to the unequal bargaining power, any ambiguities in their Terms must be resolved in your favor. Research precedent, including anything judges have said about click-wrap vs browse-wrap agreements in your jurisdiction.
Maybe you can find a sympathetic lawyer from a prestigious firm who's willing to write them on your behalf on their firm's letterhead. All this might simply scare them into settling - it's far cheaper for them than paying a lawyer to litigate (and less toxic publicity), and eliminates the risk that if you manage to win (small-claims is a bit more unpredictable than big-boy court) it sets a precedent that could come back and bite their business model.
Hi, Lisbeth Kaufman here (CoFounder and CEO of KitSplit). I feel terribly for Yohahn and the other owner who had their gear stolen. I wanted to personally respond to let you know that we are fixing this and making them whole- and then some.
We are launching a new insurance product for our owners: the KitSplit Theft Protection Owner Guarantee. It’s something we’ve been considering for a while, and with this latest theft it’s clearly time.
The Owner Guarantee means that KitSplit owners will be covered in all scenarios, whether damage, loss, or theft. To make good on this promise, we’re starting by reimbursing the Yohahn and the other owner.
We are the first rental platform to offer coverage of this kind. It fills a major insurance loophole, and it’s the right thing to do for our customers.
So if KitSplit explicitly absolves itself from liability, what is the benefit of that platform over Craigslist? At least with CL you wouldn't have to pay KitSplit a fee.
Their fees certainly aren't going towards liability insurance or fraud detection, so what are they doing with those fees?
I bet the fraud rate at KitSplit is going to go up after this post. Now you have a list of people that will wake up at 7am to hand over $4k of gear to you, knowing that KitSplit won't do anything and neither will law enforcement. Just remember to cancel your credit card and you'll make a quick $2k!
In all seriousness, if KitSplit wanted to stop this just charge renters a hefty deposit (the approximate cost of resell) and it should nip this in the bud. Obviously, someone in their "Growth" team will point out that this will hurt their KPIs and their VCs might not like it, so they won't do it.
She also claims their assessment of people signing up to KitSplit is effective at blocking 99.99% of bad actors and stopping millions of dollars of theft on the platform, almost surely an exaggeration.
>She also claims their assessment of people signing up to KitSplit is effective at blocking 99.99% of bad actors and stopping millions of dollars of theft on the platform, almost surely an exaggeration.
If this is true, they should easily be able to afford to self insure against theft by charging 10 cents per thousand dollars of gear rented.
The article paints in painful detail how the website claims one thing and the contractual terms do the opposite, resulting in the user being suckered by fine print. Literally, this is a problem of false advertising.
Instead of proper fixes to the problem, they will add more fine print and more reasons to rub it in your face when your gear gets stolen.
Not only no compensation, I see no actual apology, and aside from a quick note about how they'll re-vet users after they change their profile info (they weren't doing this already?), there's a whole lot of text explaining how it will still be your fault if the equipment gets stolen.
In the end, there's not even a "contact me to get this sorted" link; it's just another call to engage with first-tier support some more.
Just use Craigslist if you're looking to make money off your high-end gear; at least then, you can know with a higher likelihood that you're being scammed.
99.99 means one stolen item out of 10,000. So they'll make $210,000(using articles info) but can't pay $3,500 to cover a stolen item out of that revenue. I bet the CEO is lying about the theft rate.
> We have 6 different FAQs that warn KitSplit users about the risk of voluntary parting.
Ouch, so this isn't the first person to get bit by this on KitSplit, just the first one to get traction. These companies need to get called out way more.
They claim they've stopped "millions of dollars of theft", but how about "voluntary parting" since its apparently not "theft"? How much "voluntary parting" have they stopped?
So from what I gather, the only parties that can potentially become "bad actors" are owners who fail to deliver the product and renters who cause a "voluntary parting" of over $200,000 in equipment - and that's how they end up at their 1/10000 incidence rate.
So perhaps KitSplit's strategy of blocking bad actors is to redefine them as neutral ones, converting millions in theft into millions in "partings" - which might not be an exaggeration.
> She also claims their assessment of people signing up to KitSplit is effective at blocking 99.99% of bad actors and stopping millions of dollars of theft on the platform
Interesting way to phrase it: "..effective at blocking 99.99% of bad actors". It sounds precise yet it is anything but because it says nothing about how many "bad actors" there are. Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? And over what period of time? A year? A day? 5 minutes? Any one of those factors could make orders of magnitude difference to the chance that one's property will be stolen.
If fraud were really as infrequent as they seem to suggest, then it seems like they should be able to absorb the losses. As it is, it appears they've so far concluded that the negative publicity will cost them less than the actual losses.
> She also claims their assessment of people signing up to KitSplit is effective at blocking 99.99% of bad actors
Elsewhere is the figure 0.1%, off by a factor of 10. It's not clear whether 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000 rentals results in theft.
However, just because 1 in 1000 rentals results in theft doesn't mean one's assessment is 99.9% effective in blocking bad actors.
Bad actors are currently a tiny minority of their users. Apparently 1 in 1000. If you blocked 99.99% of them, then theft would drop to 1 in 10,000,000 rentals. Her claimed numbers make no sense in the context of their actual theft rates. And yes, legally under criminal law it is theft, it is not voluntary parting. Voluntary parting does not appear to be a principle from criminal law and instead is something invented by insurance industry contract attorneys to deny responsibility for insurance claims.
10 BPs.. Also if they're letting the fraudsters continue to use the service (why wouldn't they if they're generating risk-free fee income to KitSplit), the fraudsters are likely more active the typical users. So if 1/1000 users are fraudsters and fraudsters are 10x more active than regular users, odds are 1 in 100 that your gear gets stolen. Ludicrous.
> This is because the renter is the client who purchases the policy and the insurance company can not file a claim against its client, the renter. That would force the insurance company to file a claim against itself, which is not how insurance works.
just a pile of incoherent absurd BS. Looks like that CEO has no idea what she is talking about. How for example does she think auto accidents are handled when both participants have the same insurance company?
Well it seems like they don't consider this voluntary parting their problem so it's probably not in that statistic. I'm sure it would have a pretty big drop if it were included.
Second time an article like this has surfaced in less than a year[0].
KitSplit claims that these scenarios are extremely rare. If that was the case, I have no idea why they wouldn't include voluntary parting insurance in their service. Is the bad press worth the occasional payout they'd need to do?
Why would I or anyone else ever use KitSplit after hearing a story like this? Peace-of-mind is literally the most important feature of a service like this. It is the only thing that separates them from your local [insert-location-here] Facebook rental group that just exchanges cash under the table.
This is pretty bad on KitSplit's part. How can they even advertise that the owner is covered by a full deposit if the owner doesn't get compensated with it upon theft?
That's blatant misleading advertising, hope this blows up on them.
The platform charged a 22% fee to allow this renting of equipment? Why charge a fee if you're not actually going to cover the buyer or seller when your marketplace messes up?
Also, just because you sign an illegal contract doesn't make that contract valid. Many companies will try to tell you "well you accepted our terms when signing up." Well those terms are not on legal grounds.
So basically, if I get a Fake ID (or just do some simple photoshop) I can become a verified buyer on KitSplit. Add in a prepaid Visa card and I can "buy" any camera/drone I want for $100?
Tech companies need to start to accept some liability for the problems they are causing.
Edit: I have a verified fake name. Now I'm waiting to see if they accept my photoshopped ID images.
Edit 2: I now also have a verified Government ID. Here is a screenshot of my totally legit verified profile. https://i.imgur.com/dr61qN5.png
If a motorcycle that you rented through Twisted Road is stolen, please immediately file a police report and cooperate fully with law enforcement, Twisted Road, the motorcycle owner, and any other authorities related to the investigation. If you are the owner, please immediately contact a Twisted Road representative and follow his or her instructions. Owners should be prepared to file a police report if instructed to do so. You will be able to provide law enforcement with the driver’s license of the rider, the plates, and other important information needed to locate and return your bike.
If you are concerned about having your bike stolen while it is being rented, we encourage you to place a GPS tracker on your motorcycle before each rental.
==========
Basically, you are responsible if your motorcycle is stolen.
Which is really dumb. If you're whole company is based around being a middle man between renters and owners your answer to the inevitable issue of theft by renters had better be better than a giant shrug and "we'll keep trying to charge this fraudster (who's definitely either using a stolen card or whole identity)."
Would I be right in assuming that such theft while renting out your motorcycle would be outside the scope of coverage if you have an ordinary consumer insurance policy on the bike?
Am I the only one who is irritated with the typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors in the KitSplit screenshots he shared? Things like "When renters rent your gear, they're also required to use a credit card which and we use to secure payment processor that includes fraud protection services." -- note the "which and we"*. There are several of these. It just strikes me as a hobbled together startup; that would be a red flag to me. That said, I know it's unreasonable to expect users to comb through all of the documentation looking for such things.... Although un-hopeful, I do hope this guy gets his gear/money back.
No, I'm annoyed by it as well. To me it makes it harder not to think of KitSplit as acting in bad faith. When the company that's supposed to deal with bad actors is itself a bad actor, how likely are they to deal with bad actors effectively?
The odd thing to me is how this is considered voluntary parting. Presumably you could show that, through KitSplit, the renter and owner entered into a legal contract. Maybe this is the true problem with the gig economy.
If I rented a car/phone/computer/camera directly from any legitimate company, you can bet that the police and lawyers wouldn't consider that <legitimate company> voluntarily parted with their property.
When I moved to the US years ago, one of the big differences I noticed (coming from Eastern Europe) was the implicit "trust" people and businesses have of "strangers", people and businesses they have never met before. Where I came from there's an implicit distrust and you have to earn your trust. Now, I thought, this implicit trust is actually great, it definitely makes so many things much easier (don't have to carry or show my ID for so many things where back in Eastern Europe you'd be required to, don't have to show up in person for almost anything, even driving license is sent over mail, etc), people take you at face value, it makes many things friction free. I generally much prefer it over the default distrust culture.
As to the security of such an approach, I always wondered what happens with bad players. Without much investigation I simply assumed that:
1. most people are likely good players
2. those few bad players would get caught by an actually functioning police force and the punishment would be so severe nobody wants to risk it
Naive I know :) I don't know about #1 but #2 is starting to become clear to me it's simply not true. Just look at KitSplit, plenty of bad actors and when that happens nobody seems to be caught. I'm starting to think that people trust strangers implicitly as a matter of comfort (it's more stressful to distrust everyone for sure) and culture (they grew up in it) rather than because they have rational reasons to do so (ex. the law is enforced and violations of said trust are severely punished).
Hi, Lisbeth Kaufman here (CoFounder and CEO of KitSplit). This is a shitty situation, I feel terribly for Yohahn and the other owner who had their gear stolen. I wanted to personally respond to let you all know that we are fixing this and making them whole- and then some.
Since we launched in 2015, tens of thousands of filmmakers and creators have safely rented gear to and from each other on KitSplit with incredibly positive experiences.
Recently, however, someone stole $3,500 cameras from two of our owners. To put it mildly, this was an awful experience for the owners. One of them wrote about it on the internet, as you know. At first, we reacted by basically telling him “sorry, you knew the risks (or should have). It’s all in our terms of service!” And technically speaking, it’s true. Traditional gear rental insurance that we (and all rental platforms) offer doesn’t cover theft by the renter.
But traditional gear rental insurance is inadequate. And so is our policy.
We’ve been pondering this problem for a while. With this recent theft, it is clearly time to solve this problem.
So we’ve decided to create a new insurance product for our owners: the KitSplit Theft Protection Owner Guarantee.
The Owner Guarantee means that KitSplit owners will be covered in all scenarios, whether damage, loss, or theft. To make good on this promise, we’re starting by reimbursing the two owners who’s gear was recently stolen.
We are the first rental platform to offer coverage of this kind. It fills a major insurance loophole, and it’s the right thing to do for our customers.
I'm immensely just surprised someone would give away their $3500 to a stranger to make a rent of $70. Even if the theft was covered, I would worry about the potential abuse of such sensitive gear. I would worry about the person leaving things in sun or dropping on floor or get water on it and so on. It is insane to me that people want to do this.
But then again folks are renting out their apartment with fully loaded furniture and appliances to complete strangers. It is infinitely surprising to me that scammers haven't made business out of this. AirBnB doesn't require real background check and with just fake FB profile, pre-loaded visa card any scammer can be in business to steal thousands of dollars of valuables. People are effectively giving away keys to their home for just few 10s of dollars and scammers are just passing this opportunity up. This wouldn't have made sense to any economist and it still doesn't. How is this possible?
> I'm immensely just surprised someone would give away their $3500 to a stranger to make a rent of $70.
turo.com facilitates giving cars worth tens of thousands to strangers for less (per day). They do claim to be insured, though - but I'm not going to be putting them to the test.
I can't really even explain how upset this makes me. I live in Brooklyn (where Kristina lives, and from where KitSplit operates). What can I do to help this situation? I'll do anything I can to help shine light on this company and fraud that their platform is facilitating.
I'm not a fan of the call out culture, but I really want to see KitSplit take some action and fix this problem.
What I found most shocking is that if KitSplit claims that less than 0.1% of rentals result in voluntary parting, why not cover this person's losses?
Maybe covering voluntary parting would result in too many fraudulent claims. If that's the case, they should clearly explain that theft is not covered and perhaps offer an insurance supplement.
In this case, I feel like KitSplit's "minimum viable product" is too minimum. Of course renters are going to steal stuff. The only value you can really provide as a middleman in this transaction is "well if they do take your camera, we'll buy you a new one".
If the fraud rate is too high for that to be a viable business, so be it. You should close your business or do better vetting. Otherwise this is just Craigslist with a 22% commission, a deal nobody would take. (Do you ever see posts on Craigslist that say "use my $3500 camera for a day for $70"? No? That's because it's crazy and nobody would ever do that. A company has the power to have contracts and vetting; and yet KitSplit cheaped out and does nothing. It makes me mad and I just heard about them five minutes ago.)
"If a renter does not return equipment, and it has not been stolen or lost, it's called voluntary parting."
I just don't understand this line of thinking at all. You rent something out for a specific and agreed upon period of time. The person decides to keep the thing you rented out. And it's not theft? Also how is it not lost?
This seems to be a general problem across the peer-to-peer rental industry. My friend had her car stolen while renting it out on Getaround and ended up in a similar situation.
These things seem to come and go in cycles. Airbnb and Uber faced several similar trust & safety issues of their own before they started building in much stronger safety and insurance protections and, crucially, convincing their customer base to continue trusting them. Now that their hard work has once again given people confidence in the P2P rental model, these upstarts are swooping in with none of the protections and reaping the benefits.
The text on the trust page linked in the article https://kitsplit.com/trust, does not specifically protect the equipment lender:
> KitSplit Short Term Insurance and Damage Coverage Options:
> Accidents happen, but on KitSplit you are always covered. Owners: rest assured that we require renters to purchase insurance, a damage waiver, or leave a full deposit. Renters: you have the choice of three kinds of coverage: you can purchase short-term coverage through our site, you can upload a certificate of insurance, or you can leave a deposit for the value of the equipment. Read more about coverage here.
This is horrible. Hopefully KitSplit goes out of business soon. What’s the use of the company? Might as well lend out gear through Craigslist. Too many companies relying on the honour system.
These kinds of sites are exactly that: niche Craigslists. Since they are marketplaces, they see their job as connecting two groups that want to engage with each other (in this case, camera owners and people who want to rent a camera), and anything beyond connecting people has nothing to do with them.
It's best to think of these kind of sites as digital telephone poles with flyers and act accordingly, but it's hard when, in an attempt to grow their user base, they exaggerate the value they offer and make people think they're safer or getting more out of them than they really offer. Those kind of tactics deserve to be called out
no, so many companies are there to collect the omission without the burden of dealing with consequences. No skin in the game. if they rent out their own gears they go out of business soon, but it is okay to lose someone else's property without any downside.
I'd never give out expensive gear on a rental site like this. If they can't really deal with people not returning / stealing cameras, what happens if they return the camera damaged? Or scratch the lens up? Sure you get money for someone to use your unused camera for a day, but how do you know that they'll treat your equipment as you would? What if they switch your camera out for one in worse condition?
The risk to reward ratio for this doesn't work for me.
[+] [-] rkagerer|6 years ago|reply
Argue the representations made on their website were misleading and induced you into using the service. That due to the unequal bargaining power, any ambiguities in their Terms must be resolved in your favor. Research precedent, including anything judges have said about click-wrap vs browse-wrap agreements in your jurisdiction.
Maybe you can find a sympathetic lawyer from a prestigious firm who's willing to write them on your behalf on their firm's letterhead. All this might simply scare them into settling - it's far cheaper for them than paying a lawyer to litigate (and less toxic publicity), and eliminates the risk that if you manage to win (small-claims is a bit more unpredictable than big-boy court) it sets a precedent that could come back and bite their business model.
[+] [-] lisbethkaufman|6 years ago|reply
We are launching a new insurance product for our owners: the KitSplit Theft Protection Owner Guarantee. It’s something we’ve been considering for a while, and with this latest theft it’s clearly time.
The Owner Guarantee means that KitSplit owners will be covered in all scenarios, whether damage, loss, or theft. To make good on this promise, we’re starting by reimbursing the Yohahn and the other owner.
We are the first rental platform to offer coverage of this kind. It fills a major insurance loophole, and it’s the right thing to do for our customers.
You are welcome to read more about the problem and how we’re fixing it here. https://blog.kitsplit.com/announcing-kitsplit-theft-protecti...
[+] [-] alex_anglin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iooi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anth_anm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calimac|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] iooi|6 years ago|reply
Their fees certainly aren't going towards liability insurance or fraud detection, so what are they doing with those fees?
I bet the fraud rate at KitSplit is going to go up after this post. Now you have a list of people that will wake up at 7am to hand over $4k of gear to you, knowing that KitSplit won't do anything and neither will law enforcement. Just remember to cancel your credit card and you'll make a quick $2k!
In all seriousness, if KitSplit wanted to stop this just charge renters a hefty deposit (the approximate cost of resell) and it should nip this in the bud. Obviously, someone in their "Growth" team will point out that this will hurt their KPIs and their VCs might not like it, so they won't do it.
[+] [-] natrik|6 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/p/4530d0062e60/responses/show
https://medium.com/@lisbethkaufman_82625/im-one-of-the-cofou...
She also claims their assessment of people signing up to KitSplit is effective at blocking 99.99% of bad actors and stopping millions of dollars of theft on the platform, almost surely an exaggeration.
[+] [-] rhino369|6 years ago|reply
If this is true, they should easily be able to afford to self insure against theft by charging 10 cents per thousand dollars of gear rented.
Odd that they don't do that huh.
[+] [-] heliodor|6 years ago|reply
The article paints in painful detail how the website claims one thing and the contractual terms do the opposite, resulting in the user being suckered by fine print. Literally, this is a problem of false advertising.
Instead of proper fixes to the problem, they will add more fine print and more reasons to rub it in your face when your gear gets stolen.
[+] [-] pixelbath|6 years ago|reply
In the end, there's not even a "contact me to get this sorted" link; it's just another call to engage with first-tier support some more.
Just use Craigslist if you're looking to make money off your high-end gear; at least then, you can know with a higher likelihood that you're being scammed.
[+] [-] adrr|6 years ago|reply
99.99 means one stolen item out of 10,000. So they'll make $210,000(using articles info) but can't pay $3,500 to cover a stolen item out of that revenue. I bet the CEO is lying about the theft rate.
[+] [-] iooi|6 years ago|reply
Ouch, so this isn't the first person to get bit by this on KitSplit, just the first one to get traction. These companies need to get called out way more.
[+] [-] kevin_b_er|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moxidize|6 years ago|reply
So perhaps KitSplit's strategy of blocking bad actors is to redefine them as neutral ones, converting millions in theft into millions in "partings" - which might not be an exaggeration.
[+] [-] usefulcat|6 years ago|reply
Interesting way to phrase it: "..effective at blocking 99.99% of bad actors". It sounds precise yet it is anything but because it says nothing about how many "bad actors" there are. Hundreds? Thousands? Millions? And over what period of time? A year? A day? 5 minutes? Any one of those factors could make orders of magnitude difference to the chance that one's property will be stolen.
If fraud were really as infrequent as they seem to suggest, then it seems like they should be able to absorb the losses. As it is, it appears they've so far concluded that the negative publicity will cost them less than the actual losses.
[+] [-] droithomme|6 years ago|reply
Elsewhere is the figure 0.1%, off by a factor of 10. It's not clear whether 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000 rentals results in theft.
However, just because 1 in 1000 rentals results in theft doesn't mean one's assessment is 99.9% effective in blocking bad actors.
Bad actors are currently a tiny minority of their users. Apparently 1 in 1000. If you blocked 99.99% of them, then theft would drop to 1 in 10,000,000 rentals. Her claimed numbers make no sense in the context of their actual theft rates. And yes, legally under criminal law it is theft, it is not voluntary parting. Voluntary parting does not appear to be a principle from criminal law and instead is something invented by insurance industry contract attorneys to deny responsibility for insurance claims.
[+] [-] ska|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] differentView|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hotgoldminer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|6 years ago|reply
just a pile of incoherent absurd BS. Looks like that CEO has no idea what she is talking about. How for example does she think auto accidents are handled when both participants have the same insurance company?
[+] [-] duiker101|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] go_ruby|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anth_anm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danShumway|6 years ago|reply
KitSplit claims that these scenarios are extremely rare. If that was the case, I have no idea why they wouldn't include voluntary parting insurance in their service. Is the bad press worth the occasional payout they'd need to do?
Why would I or anyone else ever use KitSplit after hearing a story like this? Peace-of-mind is literally the most important feature of a service like this. It is the only thing that separates them from your local [insert-location-here] Facebook rental group that just exchanges cash under the table.
[0]: https://petapixel.com/2018/10/29/how-i-lent-my-4500-camera-k... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18332918)
[+] [-] ArchReaper|6 years ago|reply
That's blatant misleading advertising, hope this blows up on them.
[+] [-] theturtletalks|6 years ago|reply
Also, just because you sign an illegal contract doesn't make that contract valid. Many companies will try to tell you "well you accepted our terms when signing up." Well those terms are not on legal grounds.
[+] [-] Jeremy1026|6 years ago|reply
Tech companies need to start to accept some liability for the problems they are causing.
Edit: I have a verified fake name. Now I'm waiting to see if they accept my photoshopped ID images.
Edit 2: I now also have a verified Government ID. Here is a screenshot of my totally legit verified profile. https://i.imgur.com/dr61qN5.png
[+] [-] op12op12|6 years ago|reply
https://medium.com/@lisbethkaufman_82625/im-one-of-the-cofou...
[+] [-] metabagel|6 years ago|reply
Their stolen bike FAQ says:
==========
What happens if the bike is stolen?
If a motorcycle that you rented through Twisted Road is stolen, please immediately file a police report and cooperate fully with law enforcement, Twisted Road, the motorcycle owner, and any other authorities related to the investigation. If you are the owner, please immediately contact a Twisted Road representative and follow his or her instructions. Owners should be prepared to file a police report if instructed to do so. You will be able to provide law enforcement with the driver’s license of the rider, the plates, and other important information needed to locate and return your bike.
If you are concerned about having your bike stolen while it is being rented, we encourage you to place a GPS tracker on your motorcycle before each rental.
==========
Basically, you are responsible if your motorcycle is stolen.
[+] [-] rtkwe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daveslash|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benatkin|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bocklund|6 years ago|reply
If I rented a car/phone/computer/camera directly from any legitimate company, you can bet that the police and lawyers wouldn't consider that <legitimate company> voluntarily parted with their property.
[+] [-] d1zzy|6 years ago|reply
As to the security of such an approach, I always wondered what happens with bad players. Without much investigation I simply assumed that:
1. most people are likely good players
2. those few bad players would get caught by an actually functioning police force and the punishment would be so severe nobody wants to risk it
Naive I know :) I don't know about #1 but #2 is starting to become clear to me it's simply not true. Just look at KitSplit, plenty of bad actors and when that happens nobody seems to be caught. I'm starting to think that people trust strangers implicitly as a matter of comfort (it's more stressful to distrust everyone for sure) and culture (they grew up in it) rather than because they have rational reasons to do so (ex. the law is enforced and violations of said trust are severely punished).
[+] [-] lisbethkaufman|6 years ago|reply
Since we launched in 2015, tens of thousands of filmmakers and creators have safely rented gear to and from each other on KitSplit with incredibly positive experiences.
Recently, however, someone stole $3,500 cameras from two of our owners. To put it mildly, this was an awful experience for the owners. One of them wrote about it on the internet, as you know. At first, we reacted by basically telling him “sorry, you knew the risks (or should have). It’s all in our terms of service!” And technically speaking, it’s true. Traditional gear rental insurance that we (and all rental platforms) offer doesn’t cover theft by the renter.
But traditional gear rental insurance is inadequate. And so is our policy.
We’ve been pondering this problem for a while. With this recent theft, it is clearly time to solve this problem.
So we’ve decided to create a new insurance product for our owners: the KitSplit Theft Protection Owner Guarantee.
The Owner Guarantee means that KitSplit owners will be covered in all scenarios, whether damage, loss, or theft. To make good on this promise, we’re starting by reimbursing the two owners who’s gear was recently stolen.
We are the first rental platform to offer coverage of this kind. It fills a major insurance loophole, and it’s the right thing to do for our customers.
You are welcome to read more about the problem and how we are fixing it here. https://blog.kitsplit.com/announcing-kitsplit-theft-protecti...
[+] [-] sytelus|6 years ago|reply
But then again folks are renting out their apartment with fully loaded furniture and appliances to complete strangers. It is infinitely surprising to me that scammers haven't made business out of this. AirBnB doesn't require real background check and with just fake FB profile, pre-loaded visa card any scammer can be in business to steal thousands of dollars of valuables. People are effectively giving away keys to their home for just few 10s of dollars and scammers are just passing this opportunity up. This wouldn't have made sense to any economist and it still doesn't. How is this possible?
[+] [-] sangnoir|6 years ago|reply
turo.com facilitates giving cars worth tens of thousands to strangers for less (per day). They do claim to be insured, though - but I'm not going to be putting them to the test.
[+] [-] ProAm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slap_shot|6 years ago|reply
I'm not a fan of the call out culture, but I really want to see KitSplit take some action and fix this problem.
[+] [-] danielfoster|6 years ago|reply
Maybe covering voluntary parting would result in too many fraudulent claims. If that's the case, they should clearly explain that theft is not covered and perhaps offer an insurance supplement.
[+] [-] jrockway|6 years ago|reply
If the fraud rate is too high for that to be a viable business, so be it. You should close your business or do better vetting. Otherwise this is just Craigslist with a 22% commission, a deal nobody would take. (Do you ever see posts on Craigslist that say "use my $3500 camera for a day for $70"? No? That's because it's crazy and nobody would ever do that. A company has the power to have contracts and vetting; and yet KitSplit cheaped out and does nothing. It makes me mad and I just heard about them five minutes ago.)
[+] [-] KukicAdnan|6 years ago|reply
I just don't understand this line of thinking at all. You rent something out for a specific and agreed upon period of time. The person decides to keep the thing you rented out. And it's not theft? Also how is it not lost?
[+] [-] g_sch|6 years ago|reply
These things seem to come and go in cycles. Airbnb and Uber faced several similar trust & safety issues of their own before they started building in much stronger safety and insurance protections and, crucially, convincing their customer base to continue trusting them. Now that their hard work has once again given people confidence in the P2P rental model, these upstarts are swooping in with none of the protections and reaping the benefits.
[+] [-] intsunny|6 years ago|reply
> KitSplit Short Term Insurance and Damage Coverage Options:
> Accidents happen, but on KitSplit you are always covered. Owners: rest assured that we require renters to purchase insurance, a damage waiver, or leave a full deposit. Renters: you have the choice of three kinds of coverage: you can purchase short-term coverage through our site, you can upload a certificate of insurance, or you can leave a deposit for the value of the equipment. Read more about coverage here.
[+] [-] msie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdreyfuss|6 years ago|reply
It's best to think of these kind of sites as digital telephone poles with flyers and act accordingly, but it's hard when, in an attempt to grow their user base, they exaggerate the value they offer and make people think they're safer or getting more out of them than they really offer. Those kind of tactics deserve to be called out
[+] [-] mars4rp|6 years ago|reply
It works I win, it doesn't you lose!
[+] [-] Bokanovsky|6 years ago|reply
The risk to reward ratio for this doesn't work for me.