Hotels have developed a new revenue stream: "algorithmic" smoke detectors
Guests report getting billed hundreds of dollars for smoking, based on the readings of an "algorithmic" smoke detector. The sensor manufacturer markets its product as a way for hotels to unlock new revenue streams.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1945959030851035223.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world666
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I have never seen a more clear cut example of a perfect use case for a credit card chargeback.
Fun fact: You can't dispute part of a charge. If you charge this back and win (you probably will) the hotel loses out on everything, for your entire stay. It also stacks up against them and raises their rates the more they get. An even vaguely concerted effort by people who have been ripped off by this would probably get the hotel in question booted from their credit card processor.
I imagine it's damn difficult to run a hotel if you can't accept credit cards. Just saying.
They disputed it with their bank, the bank sided with the hotel because of the sensor report. Just saying.
Sounds like they also need to find a new bank, then. Or more people need to file — Once banks get wise of a particular scam, they'll start taking a more dim view of it.
STOP USING BANK CARDS TO PAY FOR SHIT.. Credit cards are the way, they are SOOOOOO much easier to deal with than a bank. Also fuck banks.
Edit: a word
Simply put:
If something gets fucked up and you used a debit card, you're the one screwed until it is sorted out (if it is sorted out). Also debit disputes can take 8+ weeks I've heard.
If something is screwed up and you used a credit card, then the bank is on the hook until it is sorted out. And typically they'll credit you the amount until the investigation is complete and it is usually complete within 30 days. I've had chargebacks remain credited simply because the other party never responded.
The commenters are saying "bank" but the original article says she disputed with her credit card company so I don't think that's the case here.
I think without actually talking to the people in question we won’t know for sure. I still feel like they used a bank debit card personally but I guess it’s up in the air.
I see no reason to doubt the original reporter who did actually speak to her. The dispute was denied by her CC after the hotel provided the report. Is that really unbelievable to you?
How do you prove to the bank or in a court of law that you didn't do something? The hotel is alleging that their algorithm detected smoking.
Besides setting up a camera which seems to be very invasive, how would you fight this?
The burden of proof that the sensors cannot provide false positives falls on the hotel chain, not the person getting charged. There is also the question of whether the sensors can be triggered by someone else, or an adjacent room.
You fight them by filing a lawsuit for fraudulently charging you.
Ah yes, the system keeping the poors in their place.
Most people can't afford the time and money required for this, so they don't bother. So corporations and corrupt people get away with all kinds of things.
This seems like a good point. That said, the bank is the failure point here. I don't know if they are actually bound to any laws, or if it's just the bank policy?
If I were them, I'd bitch the bank out and threaten to leave. This is such a clear case of fraud they aren't fighting.
They tried that. If the credit card denies it you could have a lawyer send a letter threatening legal action but that's all going to be at an extra cost unless you know an attorney or they think they could make enough to o do it on spec.
A lawyer will send a demand letter, not an affidavit.
An affidavit is for sworn testimony given under oath by someone who is unwilling or unable to appear on the witness stand.
A demand letter is a formal written request for action or payment prior with a threat of legal action for noncompliance.
If they ignore the demand letter then the next step is a civil suit. Depending on the amount this might end up in small claims. Also, tort cases only require a preponderance of evidence.
A preponderance of evidence essentially means you only have to prove something is more likely than not which, in this case, would be pretty easy. The big issue is the expense of this process almost makes it not worth it.
The American legal system favors those with resources.
That's what I'm saying though - it will come down to sworn testimony, and their data from the sensor will likely constitute a preponderance of evidence.
The burden is on the plaintiff, not the defendant. Whomever brings the suit needs to prove that it's more likely than not that they're were incorrectly fined.
Since these devices seem to basically be VOC sensors it wouldn't be that hard to do this.
To a non-technically literate judge/jury. Many people just trust "the data" or "the authority" or "the technology".
I understand that, but bringing one of these sensors into the courtroom and turning on a Dyson air wrap, spraying hairspray, using baby powder etc. and then comparing the results would show the susceptibility of these to be wrong.
It's a demonstrably flawed system so you just need to demonstrate the system in action.
Or you pay monthly for a law service. Those types of letters are exactly what those programs are intended to cover.
In two different cases where I've disputed part of a charge/order, the credit card company returned the money for the entire order like you said. I was surprised they did that, and didn't realize that was the norm.
On the one hand, I never wanted anything I extra that I didn't deserve. On the other hand, both times this has happened to me, the companies at fault really, really went out of their way to deserve it. Not necessarily scam level deserved it like this hotel's smoke detector scam, but still.
Many credit card software providers also charge for the investigation of chargebacks, to the tune of hundreds of dollars, even if the chargeback is reversed.
Accumulating a history of chargebacks against you as a merchant, even if the consumer ultimately loses them, also counts against you and will raise your rates. The processors don't like dealing with merchants that they perceive as excessively risky.
I have to deal with this in my business and the whole thing is really a pain in the ass.
That’s not where it ends though. They can send you to collections.
Happened to me from Verizon after I returned their modem and they said I didn’t.
Many different collectors called and wouldn’t the same track# and photos to show it was returned. It eventually went on my credit, which took a slight hit for all of 2 months.
This is why it's great to belong to the 90% of the world without credit scores. Something similar happened to me, I just sent the company an email that told them that they bought bad credit after a washing machine manufacturer charged me for an in-warranty repair that they didn't even perform.
Haven't heard from them since.
Then they just threaten to take you to court.
Feel free, it has to be settled in a consumer protection arbitration court, who will by default side with me.
There is basically a "forced arbitration" law in effect, but not toward people who sue the company, but toward the company that would sue people.
It depends if you have the time and/or mental energy for that
lol fuck these people and these hotels. It’s not about not smoking, it’s about charging more money.
How is this a plus for guests wtff
Devils advocate, I guess the room won’t smell like shit
Oh it will.
Why would companies who willingly scam you wish to spend money to keep their rooms nice, when they're straight up stealing from their guests?
Have you never watched Hotel Hell?
What’s that guy doing?
"That guy"?
I'm offended on behalf of anyone who's ever cooked or worked in hospitality.
"That guy" is Gordon Ramsay, and he's pulling the firealarm, because the hotel is too filthy for people to actually be habiting it.
You know shit is bad when you're in restaurant/hotel and you see Gordon Ramsay.
Here's the full episode where the gif is from (not only is Gordon pretty good at cooking, he's great at utilising social media and YouTube as well)
VILE Hotel Forces Gordon To Pull Fire Alarm | Hotel Hell FULL EPISODE
Edit if you want the specific bit, here's the 30 seconds preceding the pulling of the alarm and then the alarm (idk if the timestamp works, he pulls the alarm at 28:08)
Oh wow, I know who he is but didn’t recognize him in the clip. I don’t seem to be able to recognize/associate people by how they look. Most people I’m close to think I’m lying or trying to be funny because I don’t know who popular people are, it would be nice to be able to recognize people.
Also, thank you for sharing the clip, I’m going to watch the full episode tonight.
Nah he has a sort of hunched gait and the picture is bad.
But yeah, you might have like a tiny bit of face blindness.
I very randomly get it as well in just specific contexts. Sometimes embarrassing when it's a friend/acquaintance.
Someone video calls you to say "hey look who I'm here with" and you're like "eeeh, I'm really bad at names" and then it gets awkward because I've known the person since I was a kid pretty much.
Just watched that video. Holy cow…I’m speechless, thank you for sharing. That seems like a really cool show.
It's always essentially just Ramsay having to psychotherapise someone, and it always begins with rubbing their face in it.
Usually they deny and lie, and a lot of the episodes are like that. Although it's not always the owner which it at issue nor similar problems, I'm just generalising.
There's the kitchen nightmares version, thats just the same but hotel hell is with hotel and kitchen.
There's quite a few full episodes up online free by him. Only like 10% at most (again, fully utilising the market). Idk if it's son or who runs the channels but they have some hilarious names for collections sometimes.
This is Kitchen Nightmares official channel:
moments so raw its telling spongebob to f*ck off | Kitchen Nightmares
Just this year he came out with a great new show, which sort of feels the same, but just much improved and streamlined: Gordon Ramsay's Secret Service(
Another one to add to the list whenever I hear tech lobbyists shout about how unregulated capitalism breeds innovation.
I tend to huff arsenic trioxide when I stay at a hotel. Will the hotel smoke detectors fine me for that?
Wow. That is.... that is some horseshit.
Sounds like an easy lawsuit. Record the entire stay, test different variables like a hair dryer, candle, fan, soldering smoke, medical equipment like nebulizer, steamer, etc. If they fine you, simply find a lawyer and request a $5M settlement fee. Boom, early retirement.
You can win actual damages and your lawyers fees in most instances. Because there is no meaningful payday in the offing you will have to spend ~100 in small claims or $5000-$50,000 in real big boy court and you will win for yourself.... $500. Where on earth are you getting $5M. Large settlements are normally because lots and lots of people are damaged in small amounts, someone's life was destroyed, or the case was uber complicated and ended up taking years of expensive lawyers.
In case 1 and 3 only the lawyers make out like bandits. In the second case you earn a bunch of money because your life is ruined.
also, who has the time and money to bail on work, pay upfront for hotel rooms and lawyers, and do this? I mean, someone - but probablynot enough people to make large corporations that worried about it, though I could be wrong about that.
Scam. I think the word is scam.
No no, it is the algorithm. There was nothing they could do. Hands were tied and you can't blame them because the algorithm did it.
It’s the Hertz AI scam in a different sector. I suspect every major rental company will have a version of this soon, and that none of them will be auditable or appealable.
Yet another huge win for those who choose to never leave their basements.
I miss my basement.
Caves have only one entrance. So you know when someone is coming uninvited. And you can just spear the fuckers.
Us?
We are treading water in the middle of the ocean.
I stayed at a "hotel" in Denver a few years ago. It was advertised as a hotel on Hotels.com, and we booked because we thought it was cool that the unit had a full kitchen and was like a condo. We thought it would be the best of both worlds, hotel amenities and Airbnb style room. We get there, and it's basically an apartment building that they've turned into a hotel. They have no staff on site, and I had to download an app to check in and do a face scan. Super not privacy friendly. Then one day we stayed in and we're having a few drinks and conversing. This was 5 guys. We weren't being beligerant or loud, just talking. It was maybe 4 pm, and not quiet hours. I get a text saying there was a noise complaint. Then we bailed and got another text saying there was a 2nd noise complaint. They threatened us with a $500 fee the 2nd time. I told them we were no longer in the room, so it wasn't us. We later found what we assumed was a bug device that notified them if we went over a certain decibel level.
I never got charged, but I was ready to fight tooth and nail with my credit card company if they did. It was very weird, and I would never book with that company again.
Do you happen to have a description of photo of the bug device? Interested to find out whether I am running into a similar situation myself.
https://tritonsensors.com/uses/hotels/
I didn't take a photo, but it was like this.
Yeah getting a shut the fuck up text every 5 minutes makes me real comfortable. Also they literally advertise it as a revenue stream. How fucked.
The crying part on that feature list is kinda messed up.
Doesn't react to the sound of the fist hitting flesh, only the crying afterwards.
Primarily just to generate more revenue. Not actually alert infractions. It’s on their fucking website. Fuck this noise. I’d wrap the damn thing in aluminum foil and watch it try to communicate then.
They’re usually hard wired via cat6 and powered by POE, and will also alert for a lack of input
Every day I love my RV more and more.
This is more of a hotel/airbnb problem than a home/vehicle problem
...the RV means I rarely stay in hotels...
So, are there any sort of devices you can buy to check for these type of things or are they mostly just hollywood TV/movie and detective game mumbo jumbo type things?
This sounds like a total bullshit whine from assholes who made a lot of noise in the middle of the night and disturbed their neighbors because they were on vacation and felt entitled.
Fuck you. Provide anything to back your shit up or shut up. And you won't. Respect others, or pay the fine.
Edit: EVERYBODY needs to stop taking complaints made by random dumbasses on the internet at face value. What the actual fuck, this is how you get fascist ants in your government.
This cunt literally ADMITS to being in the wrong in the text! 🙄
You should go on a walk outside. Go find your nearest tree, see the way the bark grows, see the little bugs that call it home and the tiny ecosystem that tree supports. Go to the nearest rock. Spend some time admiring its strata, think about how it got there over millions and millions of years. Feel the sunshine on your face. Feel the wind ripple through your hair.
Do all this, then come back and re-read what you wrote.
Bruh go touch some grass
Ok troll. Fuck off
if something is advertised as a hotel it damn well better have sound dampening between the rooms
This puts me in mind of the landlord asking for a photo of the water not being hot. What would you expect "proof we were not noisy" to look like?
Isn't this a textbook candidate for a class action suit?
Some lucky lawyers will get rich off of this.
Don’t forget about the lucky customers that might get almost half the fee back.
Half? What kind of class action lawsuits have you been a part of?
Seems like mostly the consumer gets back some 2% or something. I have to assume they are intended to be punitive rather than to make the customer right.
Couldn't that be interpreted as a confession that their air is at least as unsafe as staying with a heavy smoker the whole night, in terms of PM 2.5 and other hazards?
Yay! Fraud!
Sounds like a great way to abuse front desk staff by proxy.
That was a very annoying read. I could feel the tiktok plug even before it was posted. This sucks, but oh my god I hate the internet now.
My thoughts exactly and while I hate making cliché comments, I'm surprised this isn't being talked about more in this thread. Felt like I was missing an adblocker, and I was glad it was only 13 tweets.
This is the one time I'm gonna be that jagweed and say I liked it. I've never once been on TikTok and I never will. But I was happy to see it in logical and streamlined format. I didn't feel the need to click on anything. Nothing got in the way... no oppressive popups, members-only, ads, etc. How sad is it that as much as you guys are complaining, and you have the right to your opinions, I found it to be one of the cleanest web pages I've seen in months.
I don't visit any of those sites either, in part because the formatting makes telling a story so challenging.
Looking onto a page like this, it's like one story was needlessly chopped up into little bits. Instead of several paragraphs formatted with the purpose of telling a smooth, coherent story, it's cut into chunks whose only parameter is character length. Outside of modern microblog-style social media, that format doesn't happen much. The result is scrolling and scrolling to read something that (I feel) could've been put into a few paragraphs in a single blog post.
Put altogether, it comes off as chunky and without any clear flow. Microblog formatting is not conductive to story-telling. It's not a criticism of the writer (I assume they were doing their best within the limits imposed), but of the formatting that breaks the flow that story-telling relies on.
IDGAF about the topic the post is discussing, and I don't need an article. I was more than fine with a quick, scannable version of what's happening so I can forget all about it. I don't know what you're all triggered on. It's a low-content low-effort highly-viral anti-AI anti-capitalism rage bait garbage post and it deserves no effort on the part of the writer or reader IMO.
I was pretty much born into the microblog style (or at least not on the Internet during the popularity of regular blog style), and even then I agree that this sucked to read as a microblog rather than a single, more coherent post. I see someone drop a 🧵 and I immediately sigh internally. I don't mind a thread post if it's literally just someone reporting facts, but trying to tell a story (and like, in a exciting or suspenseful way) in threads that are like 2 sentences long sucks. Sometimes I wish people would just post on a blog/article/long post site and then just post ap link to the full text on their microblog.
Meh.
Once again though, this is a meaningless garbage article designed to rage bait people, it's not something anybody's going to talk about, we've already spent more time arguing about the web page than the content.
always put a bag over the smoke alarm!
now THAT'S illegal
Yet another way your country fucks over it's citizens
Anyone got a mirror of the article that is not geoblocked?
Do archive pages work for you? If so, give this a try: https://archive.ph/2uKUX
Better refuse to pay the bill unless the item is removed. If they don’t remove it, contact your bank and block the payment.
A lot of hotels will require a card to put on file at check-in. The paper you get after your stay is typically an invoice, not a bill to be paid. They tell you how much they charged you, it's up to you to dispute if you disagree with something.
I beg the Death Asteroid to rain down on us.
This is why I preemptively destroy the hotel room.
I looked up the sensor and it's max operating temp is only 112F, which is colder than McDonalds coffee. Hell, the hotel hot water tap is probably hotter than that. The hotel blow dryer gets hotter than that...
I'm going to start away from Hilton hotels after reading through this.
Just now? Lmao
The article is about a Hyatt not a Hilton?
The other linked article is about a Hilton that's doing the same thing.
Gotcha; I had read the primary thread but then presumed the other article was about the exact same series of incidents. Thanks!
Ah one step closer to "Fuck you, pay me" business style.
I see people talking about chargebacks in this thread which is the logical course of action for a case like this.
What’s nefarious about this is that Hilton and Merriot each own a ton of hotels. If you chargeback multiple times against one of those groups you could get block listed from their locations which can get very problematic in locales without much competition.
I'd hire a lawyer and hit them for reimbursement of the $500 fee, my legal fees, slander for claiming I'm a smoker, punitive damages, and any another other monetary penalty I could think of. I'm sure I could find a lawyer that would be salivating over this.
This should absolutely be becoming a massive class action suit against both the hotel and the smoke detector maker. All you have to do is prove in court that the detector can be triggered by things other than smoking.
You know those plastic hair covers fit really nicely over the smoke detectors.
I am so curious how you made this Olympic level leap of an assumption.