A consumer watchdog said that scams involving the popular ticket booking website Booking.com increased by more than 580% in 2018. The total amount of money lost was more than $337,000.
Three hundred and sixty-three people told the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) about scams involving Booking.com in 2023, up from fifty-three the previous year.
A Booking.com representative said that phishing emails had been sent to some of its hotel partners with the goal of taking over their computers.
“This has sometimes allowed fraudsters to get into their Booking.com account without permission, which lets them pretend to be the accommodation for a short time and send emails and messages to guests,” the spokesperson said.
“It’s important to note that Booking.com’s backend systems and infrastructure have not been hacked, and the accommodations that have been affected are barely a small part of all the ones on our platform.”
A representative for the platform said that better safety measures had been put in place to protect users and urged travelers to report any texts that seemed odd.
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The ACCC told Booking.com users to check any email with a link or file that asks for personal or financial information, sign-in information, or both.
It was said by the watchdog that real Booking.com employees would not ask customers for their account password or financial information like a credit card number over the phone.
The body also said that people should find the hotel website’s phone number on their own and not rely on contact information sent in an email or text message.
At the time, Booking.com strongly denied that its system had been hacked and said the messages were caused by problems in the email systems of its partner hotels. But the hotels that were impacted said that this could not have happened on their end.
Scams cost Australians a record $3.1bn in 2022, up from $2bn the previous year. The amount of money that people have lost and reported to ScamWatch has gone down. From September 2022 to November 2023, it dropped 13%.
Last year, more than 100,000 complaints were sent to Australia’s financial body. Of those, 9,000 were about scams, which is almost twice as many as the year before. A lot of comments were about how banks dealt with scams.
Stephanie Tonkin, CEO of the Consumer Action Law Center, said it was “shocking” that more people were falling for scams on Booking.com.
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