Oh man, never using booking.com again — showed up for a 9-night stay and the building owner knew nothing about it. Fake host posting. Customer service has not been very helpful. I got the bare minimum refund. But after hours of being on hold over various calls, they are not offering any meaningful help with the fact that now all lodgings are double or triple price from what I had booked nor really acknowledge they’ve caused this situation. They offered to pay the difference for one other posting that had 2/10 stars and the reviews said “is a scam” — so yeah I guess it is an equivalent lodging… (The original scam that tried to hit me seemed to be that the fake host asked for some out-of-channel money at the beginning, but I thought he was new to the platform and just explained that booking.com will send him money when done, and then they didn’t push it. In hindsight a big red flag to even ask, so I guess that much is on me.)