Be careful if you get an email from booking.com asking to pay in advance

Brendan Burgess

Brendan Burgess

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Three people have reported to the Irish Times that they have been targeted and the scammers seem to know their names and details of the booking.

www.irishtimes.com

‘Email had my booking reference plus details of guests’: Booking.com customers targeted by scam

Three Pricewatch readers victim of similar scams: ‘My concern about this is how sophisticated it is’
www.irishtimes.com www.irishtimes.com

Booking.com says that it is phishing and that they have not been hacked.

Next up is Grainne. “I received an email from Booking.com to my Gmail account to advise me I had a new message in the Booking.com app. The email looked very like every other email update I have received by hotels as in it included my booking reference plus the details of guests etc,” she writes.

“The message said due to an update with their booking policies I needed to add an additional card to secure my booking. I clicked on the link and it took €314 out of my Revolut account. Before I approved the transaction I asked the booking agent about it and they said it was just a hold and I would get a refund.”

Based on this assurance, she approved the transaction in her Revolut account.

“Within 10 minutes I sent a message to the hotel via the Booking.com app and they came back to say it wasn’t them who sent the message I got. I contacted Revolut immediately and cancelled my card. I then raised a chargeback request [which] was denied as I approved the fraudulent payment,” she says.
 
Last week I received an email from Booking.com confirming a reservation that I hadn't made. It was for a 4 star hotel somewhere in Turkey, a country that I have never even looked at on Booking.com and have no great desire to visit.

I immediately went into my Booking.com online account and cancelled the booking. I also notified both the hotel and booking.com and, to date, neither of them have even acknowledged my email. No costs were involved, but it was enough to make me close my Booking.com account.
 
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That report does not look to be correct

It's very easy to put in a false link e.g. www.booking.com

someone clicking on that might think that they were going to booking. com but they are just going to the askaboutmoney home page.

I would be more worried about people getting an email which knows their booking details. That must have come from the hotel or booking.com

It's not phishing.

Brendan
 
Brendan Burgess said:
That report does not look to be correct
Click to expand...
Indeed I was surprised at this part:

Lee said he entered his card information into this site (using a Revolut debit card) and the €376 was taken from his account.
Click to expand...

My own experience is that Revolut finds lots of genuine transactions suspicious and blocks my card temporarily as a result.

Revolut has much better IT systems than any legacy bank and I would imagine it can identify a merchant used by fraudsters much better as a result.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
That report does not look to be correct

It's very easy to put in a false link e.g. www.booking.com

someone clicking on that might think that they were going to booking. com but they are just going to the askaboutmoney home page.

I would be more worried about people getting an email which knows their booking details. That must have come from the hotel or booking.com

It's not phishing.

Brendan
Click to expand...
I must admit that when I read that part (i.e. about the scammers having the booking details), I think the person is either embellishing the story by making that part up or it’s the person’s own email account that’s been compromised.
 
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