During the celebration of the festivities of Valentine’s Day couples and groups of friends interested in doing trips and finding experiences in other places can be affected by different dangers when making transactions online. Although the cases of phishing are very common, those that have details about hotel reservations and personal information they are unusual.
In the case of emails of this type, which seek impersonate of companies and organizations for people to deliver sensitive information on a voluntary basis, it is not common to find details about the user even when this type of cyber attack represents the 80% of the cases reported according to the report Fraud Beat 2022.
In the event that people have made reservations or a bank transaction through the internet on the bookingwhich is dedicated to the generation of reserves of hotels and flights onlinesome users report being scammed with emails with a real appearance that talks about a “problem with the payment process”, although there are also others such as “confirmation of booking“, among others.
Online scams from the Booking platform include messages through fake emails with personal information. (Ars Technica)
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How this online scam works
According to the reports of people who suffered the consequences of this campaign of phishingone of the details that do not allow us to identify that it is a email suspicious is that the address from which it is sent does not correspond to the characteristics of one that could be harmful.
In addition, users also indicate that the fact that this type of emails include personal information (name, reservation confirmation number, name of the hotel and dates of the stay) from the first moment does not produce distrust in them because they are so specific that suspicions are not aroused about them.
On the other hand, various cases of direct contacts were also reported through WhatsApp in which reference was made to an existing reservation in the hotel in which the victim would stay in the event that a cell phone number has been shared for contact within the website of the travel booking platform.
Online scams from the Booking platform include messages through WhatsApp. (Ars Technica)
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forum users Reddit managed to find a possible reason for this type of scam that uses the name of booking to steal people’s banking information: cyber attacks of this type and with similar characteristics have appeared since the year 2018 in different means of communication in which it is indicated that the platform would have been hacked ever since.
“We have been informed that some partners of accommodation They have been targeted by phishing emails, which unfortunately has led to their systems being compromised,” says the release launched by the companywhich clarifies that even though its users were affected, the security breach did not occur in its website.
In the event that people who have used this service and have been affected in their cyber security, booking indicated that their accounts were blocked to reduce the risk of possible unwanted access and prevent them from losing their reservations in hotels and flights.
Online scams from the Booking platform include messages through fake emails. (Ars Technica)
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The platform also indicated that “we are actively supporting any customer potentially affected, since our teams of security continue to investigate this problem”, so in the presenteven when there is the possibility that users may be victims of this type of online hoaxesthe company behind the service will keep them informed about the status of their accounts and shopping additional.
