Getting away with it all
Dreaming of that perfect villa with a pool, or beach-house with fabulous views, or even a cosy cottage in the Highlands with nothing but mountains to look at, can get a lot of us through the winter.
When you work hard, you want to know that when it comes to spending your cash on a holiday, it’s exactly what you hoped – and paid – for.
But in our online world, holiday booking fraud is on the rise.
According to police statistics, holidaymakers were conned out of £7.2m last year, with some people losing thousands of pounds booking holiday-let apartments or villas that didn’t really exist.
When we looked at this issue last year we heard from one victim who contacted us after being scammed by a seemingly idyllic Greek villa on Airbnb.
After contacting the “host,” she was sent what appeared to be an email from Airbnb, with what looked like the right logo, right URL and none of the shoddy spelling mistakes you associate with scam emails.
She lost £3,000, mistakenly believing that, although she was making a bank transfer, it was within the safe confines of Airbnb’s website.
It’s not just Airbnb that is affected. We’ve heard of several cases of these fake listings on direct-from-owner booking sites and unfortunately if you transfer funds outside of the official booking websites, you don’t get the protections they offer and there’s nothing you can do to get your money back.
As part of a Which? Travel investigation last year, we managed to place fake listings on Airbnb and Tripadvisor’s Holiday Lettings, including asking people to email the owner directly which is against the sites’ rules.
Both firms said they were constantly looking for ways to stay ahead of scammers.
Since our probe, Airbnb has taken steps, including more prominent warnings urging users to always communicate directly through its website and a new category of stay called Airbnb plus – properties which have been visited by an employee from the company.
But the fraudsters haven’t gone away – and we believe more needs to be done by the holiday sites themselves to protect people.
While we keep the pressure up on them, remember to never pay for holiday accommodation by bank transfer or deal with an “owner” on a direct basis, and it’s always worth reverse image searching the accommodation picture, because you may well find it is used on hundreds of different advertised holidays, which is a sure sign of a scam.