We are currently in the midst of the holiday season, a time when many choose to take vacations and travel to other countries. Just as we have apps to view flights and book our plane tickets, there are also tools to easily book hotels. Booking.com is one of the most popular platforms, but despite its usefulness, it has had a long history of fraud and scams. The latest incident involves hackers attacking hotels registered on Booking.com, resulting in numerous cases of scams targeting customers.
When searching for a hotel, one can do it the “old-fashioned” way by going to Google, searching for an area where we want to stay, and viewing the entire list of available hotels. While this method shows us many results, it is not a quick way to see all the available options. We would have to check each hotel’s location, price, available rooms, and other information needed. That’s why apps like Booking.com are much more efficient in providing what we are looking for. With a quick glance, we can list all the hotels that interest us based on preferences and book them just as easily and quickly.
Scams have returned to Booking.com, with hackers taking control of hotels.
Booking.com is the web version of the app, serving essentially the same purpose, so we can refer to both interchangeably as they belong to the same company. Both the app and the web version have been constantly labeled as unreliable sites where users may be scammed or have their data and money stolen. This is not the first time this has happened, as one can find a multitude of news articles about scams on Booking.com online. In fact, just a few weeks ago, fraud cases involving Belgian users were discovered.
HKEPC has reported that Booking.com scams have returned, this time due to hackers who have managed to obtain login credentials for hotels. Once inside, they impersonate the owners and start sending messages to guests and customers.
The scam is perpetrated by sending a message indicating that the credit card information is incorrect.
To give us an idea of what these messages look like, they usually indicate that the added credit card information is incorrect. They then ask customers to click on a link to log in, where the fraud takes place. The reservation is canceled, and the scammers take the credit card information, which was not actually incorrect.
Despite the ongoing complaints from affected users, Booking.com has reportedly done nothing about the issue, and the company has not acknowledged the hackers’ attack. The report on the cybercriminals comes from Kaspersky, best known for its antivirus software.
The news of hackers posing as hotels and scamming those making reservations on Booking.com first appeared on El Chapuzas Informático.
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