Or, it could be some sort of scam-- this would void airbnb's insurance they cover us with, blah blah.My second reaction...

My personal feeling is if you have roughly $1000 in cash flow/mo ($4000 rent- $2500 expenses -$500 for the unsuspected), fix up the house to avoid any major headaches while your gone, but rent it to a stable tenant (maybe a family).In my mind, If you have done a good job of preparing/updating the house cost effectively and find a very solid tenant, you should have no problem being gone at least a year and that extra $1000 dollars a month will go very far in helping you start a free lance career...etcAnd, on top of that, there is nothing suggesting the Southern Cali market will be dropping anytime soon, so if you decide to sell a year from now, you will have an extra 6-8% appreciation based on all current predictions.  

No businesses operated out of the property, but I would never rent to a scam artist.

I've heard of unrecorded leins popping up for unsuspecting buyers even after a title search.

They know there are a lot of applicants who scam the system.  

To tenants wishing to scam me(or my management) now or in the future, I have one hyphenated word for you.

They say it is full of scams.

Ultimately, it also turned into a scam situation where someone else changed my Criagslist post and was requesting people to wire them money to hold.Please help.

This is a classic scam, when they know you can't reach people to verify their references, etc.  

International students usually are serious assuming it is not a scam.