Trust me, anybody who's rented to more than a couple of people has experienced it. Anybody I've talked to, anyway.
As to who these people are: it's a mixed bag. I keep wanting to write some kind of tl;dr screed here, but ... it's complicated.
I'll say this, though. I went to school with a guy whose dad was the manager for an American-owned automotive plant in Spain. They lived in a freaking mansion in Cadiz, although they were basically regular people from Cleveland or Akron or someplace. But he basically grew up a lot richer than me (and considered me bourgeois, but damn we were young and foolish).
He told me the story once about how he'd been depressed and visited a friend of his who was housesitting for their teacher at the American school there. I.e. another rich kid. So what this friend did to cheer him up, among other things, was to set up a target and throw knives at it. Except instead of knives, they destroyed every pair of scissors in the house and used the halves as throwing knives, you see. He laughed about how the teacher must have been perplexed about having no scissors when he got back from his trip.
I'm sure that he'd be mortified to know that I remember this story twenty years later, which is why I'm not naming names (yes, Mr. Google, I'm watching you!)
OK. So extrapolate that rich kid's behavior - and this was a good guy who I really liked - to our original post here. It's the same thing, just a lot more extreme. There are just people who think that kind of exploitation of the vulnerability of others is funny and fun, although I'm sure the vast majority grow out of it at some point.
It's kind of like sociopaths, I guess, as abused as that concept has gotten lately. I think there are those of us who would never have considered finding all the scissors in the house they were entrusted with, and tearing them in half for knife throwing. I'm one of those people. You probably are. And sadly, AirBNB is probably made up exclusively of that category of people. And probably the vast majority of users of AirBNB also fall into this category.
Now, one didn't. Honestly - I think the only way AirBNB is going to weather this is to have some serious, serious talks with an insurance provider and have some kind of blanket coverage they can extend to their hosts, perhaps with an additional fee - but they're not going to get through it with just being nice guys. Which arguably they are.
So that was really more than I intended to write. Sorry.