Criminals Are Using Airbnb Rentals to Hide Drugs, Cash, and Weapons
Belgium's top drug official, Ine Van Wymersch, has warned that criminal gangs are using short-term rental platforms like Airbnb to stash money, drugs, weapons, and even people. She is calling on these platforms to make it harder for criminals to use their services.
In an interview with the Guardian published on 11 August 2026, Van Wymersch explained that criminals take advantage of how easy these platforms make it to rent a place. For example, someone can book an apartment for three days and cancel for free. Belgian authorities do not yet know exactly how often this happens, she said, but they keep seeing it turn up in police operations.
Her warning follows a real case from early August 2026. Belgian police found 3.3kg of cocaine and €4,845 in cash in an Airbnb-rented apartment in central Brussels, believed to have been used for storing and packing drugs, according to the Belga news agency. In 2024, 11 people were sentenced for running drugs between Belgium and the UK, after drugs worth €21 million were seized from an Airbnb rental in Staden, West Flanders. Belgian authorities had previously arrested six British men linked to an international drug ring that used Airbnb properties to store drugs, according to AFP via Barron's.
Van Wymersch did not stop at short-term rentals. She also pointed to the boom in online shopping as a big help to criminal groups. Anonymous email accounts, encrypted messaging apps, digital currencies like Bitcoin, and the huge number of packages being delivered every day all make it easier for criminals to operate. Delivery companies are especially easy to take advantage of, she said, because "white vans handing over small boxes are no longer a suspicious situation." She said plainly that the booming e-commerce business "facilitates organised crime enormously" The Guardian.
This is not just a Belgian problem. In the UK, so-called "county lines" gangs — criminal groups that move drugs from big cities to smaller towns using mobile phone lines — have been documented using Airbnb-rented homes as drug dens and luring teenagers with promises of easy money, according to a 2019 Guardian report. A charity cited by The Independent that same year warned that children caught up in county lines drug dealing were being stabbed, raped, tortured, and exploited by gangs. The European Court of Justice had already ruled in September 2020 that European cities could crack down on short-term rentals of private homes to address housing shortages, a decision that showed growing interest in regulating platforms like Airbnb more tightly.
Van Wymersch became Belgium's first-ever national drug commissioner in 2023. The job was created after Antwerp, a major port city, became one of Europe's main entry points for cocaine. The appointment came amid rising drug-related violence. Antwerp saw grenade attacks and the fatal shooting of an 11-year-old girl caught in a conflict between rival drug gangs. In 2022, Belgium's justice minister was placed under police protection after an alleged plot to kidnap him was uncovered. An anonymous investigative judge who lived in a safe house for four months warned that Belgium risked becoming a narco state — a country where drug trafficking groups hold power that rivals the government's.
Airbnb's response has been cautious. A company representative in Belgium declined to comment and pointed the Guardian to remarks by Clément Eulry, Airbnb's country manager for France and the Benelux region. Eulry told De Standaard that criminal bookings were an "extreme minority" of the millions of bookings Airbnb handles each year. He said the company uses artificial intelligence to spot suspicious bookings and reports problematic renters to police and local authorities.
Van Wymersch acknowledged that short-term rental companies provide a real, legitimate service. But she insisted they need to do more. The tension she points to is built into how these platforms work: they are designed to make booking fast, easy, and low-hassle — exactly the things criminals want. Free cancellation, booking under fake names, and the lack of the checks that hotels face all make it less risky for criminal networks to operate.
The broader context here is that Belgium faces several problems at once. It has a major port bringing in huge amounts of cocaine, a transport network that criminals can use to move goods, and a digital economy with tools like encrypted messaging and cryptocurrency that make illegal trade easier. Van Wymersch's argument that e-commerce acts as a force-multiplier for organised crime connects the short-term rental issue to a much wider web of digital and logistical tools that help criminals.
Whether changes made by the platforms themselves, AI-assisted detection, or pressure from governments will be enough to close these gaps is the question Belgian authorities and their European partners will now be weighing. Van Wymersch's own admission that authorities do not have a precise sense of how big the problem is suggests the gap between the threat and the response remains wide.
