Booking.com is open to fraudulent schemes and you can find yourself on the street by booking a hotel.
Booking is open to fraudulent schemes and you can find yourself on the street by booking a hotel.
Most likely, when traveling, you prefer to use booking services that have a reputation. This is understandable, because risking money by booking hotels or apartments on dubious sites or forums can result in a loss of money. Most tourists and visitors to the city will choose a booking service. Have you ever made a reservation on this service? Was everything going well? If so, then most likely you were not the unlucky person who fell into the hands of scammers who use loopholes in the booking to launder money.
Another option for the development of events is booking an apartment using stolen cards. Yes, your data could have leaked somewhere, or you simply lost your bank card. In this case, any person can freely use the booking services, and you, as a cardholder, will try for a long time to prove that the booking was not made by you. The intruder will have time to live in the hotel at your expense without any difficulties.
So basically, this is all that scammers need to fool the site:
Create email;
Buy an online number to verify your account;
Upload photos of some real properties you randomly found online;
Spend the evening filling out and entering data publicly available;
Enter a fixed rate for a day
Post your ad and wait for potential victims;
You’re probably scratching your head now and trying to figure out how this scam works. But ponder no more because we ran a real experiment and recorded every step including our attempt to contact Booking.com directly. This money laundering scheme needs at least three main characters:
A scammer who is in possession of someone else’s bank card information. We ask our main editor to play this role.
A victim whose bank card is used to book a hotel. We asked another member, Alex, to play this role. With authorization, we used his personal bank account. He will try his best to reverse the successful debit of the funds from his account. We will see how it goes.
An unsuspecting tourist who thinks he scored big time with a huge discount of 50% on a night’s stay at his chosen hotel. This role was assigned to another one of our team members
Our team “anyname” has made an experiment where we tried to check how easy it is to scam on booking.com
