Airbnb hosts - recent influx of suspicious booking requests??

[Jennifer T.]

I'm an Airbnb host in a major city (Philly) and ever since the covid lockdown started, I've gotten a lot of booking requests that are really weird because they all have the same red flags in common. My property manager doesn't accept suspicious bookings and there have always been a few once in a while, but recently that's the ONLY kind of booking request that I have received.  

The people making requests all have: 

- NO profile pics
- ALL are local from Philly
- ALL profiles are minimally verified
- All requests are for ~2 days on random dates this and next month
- Almost no one has any reviews
- No request really has a solid/detailed message stating their purpose for booking 

It almost feels like they are fake accounts compared to all the successful bookings I've had the entire time before the lock-down. I have a couple of theories but I'm not sure how much water they hold lol.. Eg. I know that Airbnb's algorithm accounts for the number of bookings a host accepts, so maybe now the time's tough and people are looking to take competition out by trying to lower their search ranking? Or maybe people are getting sick so they are looking for other places to shelter their family temporarily? 

I've also been reading up on the sketchy stuff happening on both sides of the Airbnb business so this is worrying me a bit. So I'm wondering if anyone else has this happened to them, or knows what is going on?