Booking.com scams surge 580% with hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses, ACCC says
Scams mentioning the popular travel booking website Booking.com surged by more than 580% last year, with total losses reaching more than $337,000, according to the consumer watchdog.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said 363 people reported scams mentioning Booking.com in 2023, up on 53 reports the previous year.
A Booking.com spokesperson said a number of its accommodation partners had been targeted by phishing emails aimed at taking over the partner’s computer system.
“In some cases this has led to unauthorised access of their Booking.com account, which enables these fraudsters to temporarily impersonate the accommodation and communicate with guests via email or messages,” the spokesperson said.
“It’s important to highlight that Booking.com’s backend systems and infrastructure have not been breached, and the number of accommodations impacted are a small fraction of those on our platform.”
The spokesperson said the platform had put better protection systems in place to protect consumers, and encouraged travellers to report any suspicious messages.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup
The ACCC has advised Booking.com users to independently verify any email with a link or attachment that requests sign-in details, or personal or financial information.
The watchdog said real Booking.com staff would not request consumers account password or financial information such as a credit card over the phone.
It said consumers should also locate the phone number to reach the hotel website themselves, and not rely on contact details supplied in an email or text, the watchdog said.
For added protection, travellers should use Booking.com’s app to access their accounts and set up two-factor authentication, the ACCC said.
Travellers using Booking.com were warned last October to not fall for scam emails asking them to confirm their hotel payment after a hack of Booking.com’s email system.
At the time, Booking.com strenuously denied its system has been hacked, instead blaming the messages on breaches in the email systems of its partner hotels. But the affected hotels complained that this could not have taken place at their end.
Australians lost a record $3.1bn to scams in 2022, up from $2bn in 2021. The value of losses reported to ScamWatch have decreased, dropping 13% between September 2022 and November 2023.
Complaints to Australia’s financial watchdog topped 100,000 for the first time last year, and of those complaints 9,000 were related to scams – nearly double the previous year. Many complaints were related to the handling of scams by banks.
Stephanie Tonkin, the chief executive officer of the Consumer Action Law Centre, said the jump in people experiencing scams via Booking.com was “shocking”.
“[It’s] yet another example of a significant high-profile company being used by scammers, and an apparent lack of security measures, in order to steal money from Australian consumers,” Tonkin said.
“The sophistication of scams means it’s near impossible for consumers to detect.”