A woman is speaking out after being secretly filmed in her bedroom while staying at a London, Ont., Airbnb. She says the camera was found in a phone charger in her room.
Chloe Le Brument and her partner, James, took a quick trip down to London for a music festival called Rock the Park in July. They decided to stay at an Airbnb room inside of the hosts’ family home. They were greeted by a guest of the home and brought to their room.
“The room itself was small. Just a bed, a desk. It was very clean, simple. We didn’t think anything of it, we didn’t plan on spending much time there,” Le Brument said.
She says James packed up the room in a haste the next morning, anxious to start heading home. But mistakenly, he left with an item that he thought belonged to Le Brument.
Within 10 minutes of leaving, the couple says they received a call from the host, “notifying us that there was a charger missing from the room” that belonged to a previous guest.
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The couple said they would mail the charger to the host when they could. But the host’s behaviour escalated. Le Brument says he frantically pestered the couple with text messages following their initial phone call saying they needed to return the device immediately, eventually saying he would charge them $70 if they failed to do so.
“Us feeling a lot of pressure to return this charger… we said, ‘What’s up with this charger? There must be gold in it.'”
Le Brument says it was her 15-year-old son who discovered there was a hidden camera inside.
Within hours the family notified the police. Investigators with London police executed a search warrant and say they found video evidence of voyeurism and that the couple was captured in the seized files.
Abinash Samal of London, 41, has since been arrested and charged with one count of voyeurism. He is scheduled to appear in court Oct. 5th.
A statement from an Airbnb spokesperson says the company “bans hidden cameras. Shortly after the guest brought this allegation to our attention in July, we took action to remove this host from the platform.”
“The guest who reported the incident to our Safety team was refunded in full.”
But the couple remains in shock and disbelief that a scenario out of a movie could play out in their own lives.
“We did find out that the camera had a livestreaming option, so you start to really think about that, like who was watching this? Or who could have been watching this?”
Le Brument says her story is a cautionary tale and a warning to those who rent out Airbnbs to be aware of their surroundings, check the room thoroughly and scope for things that are out of place.
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