Belgium Warns Short-Term Rental Platforms Are Becoming Tools for Organised Crime
Belgium's national drug commissioner Ine Van Wymersch has warned that criminal gangs are using Airbnb-style short-term rentals as stash houses for money, drugs, weapons, and people, and is calling on booking platforms to make their systems harder for organised crime to exploit.
Speaking to the Guardian in an interview published on 11 August 2026, Van Wymersch said criminals take advantage of how flexible these platforms are — for instance, booking an apartment for three days with free cancellation. Belgian authorities do not yet have a precise picture of how widespread the problem is, she noted, but the pattern has surfaced repeatedly in law enforcement operations.
Her remarks follow a concrete case from early August 2026, when Belgian police seized 3.3kg of cocaine and €4,845 in cash from 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 a drug trafficking operation between Belgium and the UK in which drugs worth €21 million were seized from an Airbnb rental in Staden, West Flanders. Belgian authorities had previously arrested six British men in connection with an international drug ring that used Airbnb properties to store drugs, according to AFP via Barron's.
Van Wymersch widened the warning beyond short-term rentals, pointing to the e-commerce boom as a major enabler of organised crime. Anonymous email accounts, encrypted communications, cryptocurrency, and the sheer volume of parcel deliveries all make life easier for criminal networks, she said. Delivery firms are especially vulnerable to being used as cover, she argued, because "white vans handing over small boxes are no longer a suspicious situation." She put it plainly: the booming e-commerce business "facilitates organised crime enormously" The Guardian.
The pattern is not confined to Belgium. UK county lines drug gangs — networks that move drugs from cities to smaller towns using dedicated mobile phone lines — have been documented using Airbnb-rented properties as drug dens and luring teenagers with promises of easy money, according to a 2019 Guardian report. A charity cited by The Independent the same year warned that children involved 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 signalled regulatory appetite for greater oversight of platforms like Airbnb.
Van Wymersch assumed her role as Belgium's first-ever national drug commissioner in 2023, a post created after Antwerp became established as one of Europe's main gateways for cocaine. The appointment came amid escalating drug-related violence. Antwerp endured 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 wield power that rivals or exceeds that of legitimate institutions.
Airbnb's response has been measured. A company representative in Belgium declined to comment and directed the Guardian to remarks by Clément Eulry, Airbnb's country manager for France and the Benelux. Eulry told De Standaard that criminal bookings represented an "extreme minority" of the millions of bookings Airbnb processes annually. He said the company uses artificial intelligence to identify suspicious bookings and reports problematic renters to police and local authorities.
Van Wymersch acknowledged that short-term rental companies serve a legitimate purpose but insisted they needed to do more. The tension she identifies is structural: platforms built on frictionless, low-barrier transactions are inherently attractive to actors who depend precisely on speed, anonymity, and the ability to disappear quickly. Free cancellation policies, pseudonymous booking, and the absence of the scrutiny applied to hotels all lower the operational risk for criminal networks.
The broader context here is that Belgium sits at the intersection of several converging pressures: a deep-water port handling enormous cocaine volumes, a logistics infrastructure that criminal networks can repurpose, and a digital economy whose tools, from encrypted messaging to cryptocurrency, reduce the friction of illicit commerce. Van Wymersch's framing of e-commerce as a force-multiplier for organised crime links the short-term rental question to a much wider ecosystem of digital and logistical enablers.
Whether platform-level interventions, AI-assisted detection, or regulatory pressure from national governments proves sufficient to close these gaps is the question that Belgian authorities and their European counterparts will now be weighing. Van Wymersch's own admission that authorities lack a precise sense of scale suggests the gap between the threat and the response remains wide.
