"With trading, you look for arbitrage opportunities, where you have an opportunity to buy things for cheaper and sell them for more," a San Francisco Airbnb host anonymously confided in his guest, an interviewer from Fast Company, for a 2013 article that's being recirculated by SharebetterSF, campaigners for the Yes on F campaign to change short-term rental regulations. As a result, it has now found its way today to Reddit and Twitter.

"In the same way, I was like, I can rent apartments for $2,000 a month, but if I were to rent them on Airbnb, I get $150 a night." In no small coincidence, the shadowy host had first moved to San Francisco as an options trader, a job he lost only to spend his mornings playing stocks and his afternoons cleaning and checking in guests for a few short hours.

This host, whom Fast Company called Bradley, was at the time ready to lease six apartments in San Francisco — all but one of his landlords, a family friend, had no idea — and with 90% occupancy, Bradley stood to make up to $144,000 a year (which he hadn't yet achieved) on a profit of $2,000 per apartment per month.

Think of it as an Airbnbnbnbnbnbnb plan. At the time, Bradley was still outfitting his newest leases with Ikea furniture, wall hangings, and coffee makers — "I try to put in everything that a hotel would," he said — so in 2013, on revenue of $48,000 and costs of $32,000 he made just $16,000. It may not seem to have been worth it, but it also doesn't sound like it was terribly difficult.

Nonetheless, "You have to be on top of it," he insisted, "You have to run it like a business." But to do so, Bradley employed an "assistant" whom he paid $50 per cleaning and $25 per check in, though he performed most of the work himself.

Stories like Bradley's, anecdotes about people running essentially illegal "businesses" by short-term renting multiple apartments full time, are definitely the last thing that the company needs told as it campaigns against Prop F and hurries to put out the fires it started last week with a passive-aggressive ad campaign in San Francisco scolding public services for not doing more with the $12 million in hotel taxes the company implicitly congratulates itself for paying — taxes Airbnb could not bring itself to begrudgingly part with until last February.

Update: Airbnb's PR rep Christopher Nulty calls the 2013 story "baseless" and SFist's reposting of it "completely ridiculous."

Asked about the current status of Bradley's operation, and whether he's still using Airbnb, he said it would be difficult to know. The company is currently researching whether such a user with multiple full-time rentals could still be in the system.

Bradley's tale is of course a far cry from Airbnb's current paradigm of a host — instead, in CEO Brian Chesky's words regarding New York, where Airbnb has also been the subject of heated debate, hosts are more "like Teya, a student who loves cooking for her guests and will use the money she has earned on Airbnb to buy her apartment in Harlem. Or Javier from Brooklyn, who works in the restaurant business and likes to show off his favorite Latin dance spots to travelers from every corner of the globe. And hosts like Lauren and her husband who are using the money they earn on Airbnb to pay off their student loans.... We all agree that illegal hotels are bad for New York, but that is not our community."

In that vein, the company is also now offering handcrafted tours by its hosts with its Journeys program, now in beta, or its Experiences model, which encourages hosts to take guests out for pub crawls or teach them a local skill.

For his part, Bradley didn't sound concerned at the time. "I think San Francisco is a big advocate of embracing its own tech companies and welcoming the disruptive technology," he says. Times, perhaps, have changed for the likes of hotelier Bradley.

Correction: SFist has updated this story to reflect that Fast Company's original reporting was from 2013, though we initially mistook it as new.

Related: Airbnb Is Now Selling 'Handcrafted' Tours Of The Mission