‘Consumers Get Screwed’: Airbnb’s and Uber’s Background-Check Company Keeps Getting Sued

Inflection, the company used by Airbnb, Turo, and DraftKings to check millions of users’ backgrounds, bills itself as a “fair and reliable way” to screen people in a matter of seconds. But on numerous occasions, the people getting screened have sued the little-known company in response, alleging that it’s created mistaken identities, misleading reports, and accusations of serious crimes they never committed—and in many cases, prevented people from accessing jobs, housing, or using online services, such as Airbnb. 

Inflection is a background check reporting service. On its homepage, the company states that more than 100,000 businesses trust its services, including ride-sharing app Turo, insurance company SelectQuote, supermarket chain Ingles, and gambling app DraftKings. Airbnb has used Inflection’s services since 2016. It provides employment candidate screening services to hiring managers through its GoodHire product, screens renters through its SafeDecision API, and does “risk assessment” for “bail agents, process servers, private investigators” through its Insight API. 

Motherboard found more than a dozen lawsuits against Inflection in the last three years, many of them from people who found out about the allegedly inaccurate reports Inflection kept about them after Airbnb banned them from the platform. These cases represent a sliver of the complaints against private background check companies in general. Some of these lawsuits have been settled, some were dismissed, while others remain ongoing. Checkr, which acquired Inflection in April and is reportedly used by Uber, Instacart, Shipt, Postmates, and Lyft, has been sued hundreds of times—mostly for violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act or other consumer credit complaints.

The lawsuits Motherboard reviewed reflected a variety of stories from people struggling to correct criminal or consumer records. The Fair Credit Reporting Act dictates that companies that provide information to consumer reporting agencies are legally obligated to investigate disputed information. 

In one lawsuit, a man alleged that his background report contained criminal backgrounds of two other men with the same name: one with a four-count felony criminal conviction where a man intended to commit an armed robbery, and another who was charged with felony possession of a Schedule II opiate with intent to manufacture, and a charge for a Class A felony for trafficking fentanyl. The plaintiff and Inflection reached a settlement in 2021.

Another lawsuit against Inflection filed in August claims that Airbnb banned a man from the platform following an Inflection background check—and also banned his girlfriend, likely due to her association with him, the complaint claims (Airbnb told Motherboard that his account was reinstated after Inflection provided updated information, and that his account was inactive for one day). The couple was planning a trip to attend his uncle’s funeral. He did some digging at the courthouse, according to the complaint, and “learned that the criminal records appearing on his [Inflection] consumer report were in reality for someone with the same first and last name, but with a completely different date of birth that did not match Plaintiff’s date of birth.” This case is ongoing.

Another man was banned from Airbnb following an Inflection background check: He was charged with a felony in 2017, went to court and was acquitted of that charge in 2019. In his recently-settled lawsuit against Inflection, filed in August by the Consumer Justice Law Firm, he claimed Inflection never followed up with the courts to reflect the acquittal. The ban derailed a vacation he’d been planning (Airbnb told Motherboard it is reaching out directly to this user “to learn more about the case and consider an appeal if he would like to proceed with one.”). This illustrates how a years-old court case can haunt someone’s day-to-day life—especially when the record is never set straight by the background reporting company, as his lawsuit alleged.

“If you don't file suit against these companies the chances that the inaccurate reporting occurs in the future increases,” David Chami, managing attorney at the Consumer Justice Law Firm, told Motherboard. “Inflection and many background check companies never actually look at the court records before putting information on a consumer's background report.” Even when this information is available for free through the court, the data that background check companies have on people comes from data collection companies that obtain, store, and sell it to third parties like Inflection, he said. 

Those data collection companies often fail to update their own records, and the records of people with similar names can be mixed with other people’s, Chami said. “That means criminal records often appear on these reports even when they belong to another person,” he said. This wasn’t the case with his client, but he noted that it’s yet another “major problem in the background screening industry and needs to be addressed.”

Misleading, incomplete, or old reports in background checks have long been a barrier against people meeting their basic needs. Background checks are used by landlords, employers, and insurance companies to decide who is and isn’t allowed to access their services. Most states in the U.S. have adopted “Ban the Box” laws in recent years, requiring employers to consider applicants’ job qualifications before viewing past criminal records. In New York, for example, job ads, applications, and interview questions aren’t allowed to mention an applicant's criminal record. These are steps in the right direction toward a goal of more equitable opportunities for people with prior convictions, especially for people of color, who are disproportionately targeted by police. But as more companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Postmates rely on algorithms to moderate who can and can’t use their platforms—and access housing or jobs—they’re turning to private third-party services like Inflection or Checkr to do the background legwork for them. 

The numerous complaints about background check services claim that they’re not doing their due diligence to get people’s records right, and in turn, they’re affecting where people can work and live on a larger and larger scale. If Uber’s millions of drivers weren’t contractors but employees, it would be one of the largest employers in the world; Airbnb is increasingly becoming one of the few viable paths left for the “American dream” of owning a home and is contributing to rising real estate prices. In recent years, these companies have steadily moved from luxury services—treating oneself to a rideshare after a long night or an Airbnb instead of your friend’s couch—into the realm of utilities, providing jobs and housing in markets they’ve taken over and defined. Issues of mistreatment, wrongful conviction, mishandled records, and discriminatory convictions within the US criminal justice system are reflected in these reports; when private companies become arbiters of personal, consumer and criminal records, those injustices follow a person around for life.

Motherboard recently investigated the rise in claims against Airbnb from people who were unfairly or incorrectly banned from the platform, either as guests or hosts. Each person we talked to shared a similar story: Airbnb was basing its background check information on inaccurate or outdated data provided by Inflection. Several were banned because of nearly decade-old misdemeanors or traffic tickets that they didn’t even know were still lingering in their records. “We know that no background check system is perfect and so we continue to work with criminal justice experts, academics and advocates to evolve our policy and appeals process to make it as effective and thoughtful as possible,” Airbnb told Motherboard in response to inquiries about these cases and its background check process overall.

Amy Shlosberg, an associate professor of Criminology and chair of the Department Criminology and Criminal Justice at Fairleigh Dickinson University, told Motherboard that the problem with Airbnb’s background check system is, at least partially, in the accuracy of the service provider they use. 

“The issue with these background check companies, generally, is that the scope of the checks varies significantly across states and local jurisdictions. In addition, the searches assume an accurate first name, last name and date of birth. This process becomes more complex for individuals outside the United States,” Schlosberg said. “Even when accurate information is provided, a person could be erroneously flagged or a potentially dangerous individual can be undetected.”

Typically, a service such as Inflection is contracted by another company to disseminate background information about users or applicants. Those services draw from other, third-party companies that are gathering the data, according to consumer rights protection attorneys Motherboard spoke to. Ideally, for the most accurate information, those data collectors would get their information directly from the courts or police records, but in this game of telephone, a dropped middle initial or slightly misspelled last name can result in catastrophic mixups. This is a situation Mark Mailman, an attorney who specializes in consumer reporting cases at Consumer Law Firm, told Motherboard that he sees frequently in his practice.

“It's a problem and a mistake can occur at any point along the chain,” Mailman said. “Most of the time, with the companies that are buying it, they're just getting what they get, and then reporting it.” 

Erroneous reports usually fall into two types, according to Mailman: Ones where identities were mixed up and someone is essentially stuck with someone else’s crimes based on misspellings or common names, and ones where the information provided is outdated or incorrect—for example, if someone’s case was dismissed, or the records were expunged or sealed, they should reflect those facts. Instead, the background check entities turn up old, incorrect information, which can make it look like someone was charged with a felony even though they never were.

The ramifications of an incorrect consumer or criminal record as supplied by these third-party companies can be far-reaching. People are denied jobs (or delayed from starting their jobs) and denied housing based on what’s in these reports, Mailman said. Landlords increasingly use them to check tenants, and companies like Airbnb and Uber rely on background checks to vet hosts, drivers, and customers. Meanwhile, these people are accusing companies that are providing these checks, like Inflection, of having incorrect information, which detrimentally impacts their lives, according to the many lawsuits against them. 

In 2021, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued an advisory opinion warning consumer reporting companies, including tenant and employment screening companies like Inflection, that engaging in “name-only matching” is a practice that not only results in real-life harm for those whose names get mixed up in databases, but is potentially against the law.

“False identity matching is especially harmful for communities of color who are disproportionately impacted by these sloppy practices,” Rohit Chopra, the director of the CFPB, wrote in a statement about the opinion. “The risk of mismatching from name-only matching is likely to be greater among Hispanic, Black, and Asian individuals because there is less surname diversity in those populations than among the non-Hispanic white population.” 

Mailman said that he’s seen an uptick in the frequency of cases of complaints against Inflection recently, and background check companies overall.

The lawsuits brought against background companies like Inflection may represent a small percentage of the people impacted by improperly handled background checks. Unlike a personal injury lawsuit, it’s not intuitive or clear that consumers have rights and legal recourse when it comes to what consumer reporting agencies claim about them. Instead, they’re frequently trapped in a cycle of pleas to platform support or disputes with the background reporting company itself—which rarely involves real-time human interaction. 

“Consumers really get screwed. They really do,” Mailman said. “With this topic, we’re talking about housing, apartments, rentals... jobs, which are really the most significant things you can imagine. They're really affecting significant aspects of your life.” 

Inflection did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Maxwell Strachan contributed reporting to this piece. 

This article is part of State of Surveillance, made possible with the support of a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. The series will explore the development, deployment, and effects of surveillance and its intersection with race and civil rights.

Update 10/11/2022, 4:40 p.m. EST: This story was updated with additional comment from Airbnb.