any municipalities have partnered with at least one of the Short Term Rental (STR) websites to ensure that STR hosts are paying their fair share of lodging taxes in their jurisdiction. The STR website taxes the guests at source, and remits the taxes to the municipality (whether city or county). Now some of those municipalities…mm
Harmari Search was again critical in evidence presented in court related to odometer tampering in Montgomery County, Ohio. The victim reported purchasing a vehicle for $2300 which the seller claimed had 140,000 miles on it, but in fact had been rolled back from 180,000 due to service records obtained by the victim. The vehicle was…mm
Many reasons exist why a short term vacation rental (STR) property may be considered illegal. From a municipal government standpoint, it could be against ordinance to operate a short term rental in a particular zoning area. Even if a short term rental operator has a permit, by having more people over than the maximum occupancy,…mm
Previous Page Second Experiment The follow on experiment was to eliminate the possibility that Irwin, the fake profile, was the cause why PYMK wasn’t triggering. So I asked Vicky to visit some of my friends that were not her friends to see whether that would trigger PYMK. She visited them each a different number of…mm
Previous Page Anecdotes from the Blogosphere I have heard some anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon, both from word of mouth and from internet sources outlined below in screenshots: The Experiment But how can we confirm this phenomenon exists? I set up a little experiment. I had a friend name Vicky use my fake Facebook profile…mm
Hundreds of municipalities are working on identifying and monitoring short term vacation rentals (STRs) to make sure they are in compliance with ordinances, properly licensed and permitted, and collecting lodging taxes. In fact some have selected a vendor to outsource this work. However, that vendor may not be delivering on all the leads that can…mm
Harmari announces a new release of Harmari Search v3.1. It contains the following changes: Significant overhaul and improvement of Alerts, especially phone number Alerts Add LetGo to CLPS as new data source Improved phone number density to 30% for major cities Fixed the Live link “View” in Forensic View Block User from searching by Email…mm
When municipalities seek to regulate short term rentals, often something that is overlooked is the permitting system. In fact the permit number has significant value to Code Compliance departments that have to make sure everyone’s on the same level playing field. Here are some suggestions on how to design permit numbers: Always put the year…mm
The advent of sharing economy B2C services has spawned new B2B services for businesses that have a significant e-commerce operation. For example, Darkstore is a company that offers a mobile app containing shipping and logistics providers in a database. In fact their website advocates “same day service fulfillment” for e-commerce sites. This has obvious implications…mm
Announcing the new release 2.9 of Harmari Search, which includes the following features: Improved phone number collection Adjust Forensic View to new phone number collection method Fixed bug with URL-to-PDF conversion on API Balanced data collection workload across different servers Fixed bug with Other Ads – Internal Server Error Add ‘trailers’ category to CL Missing…mm