Scammed through booking.com

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43

Thank you. Will keep my fingers crossed
Glad you got your money back

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44

This exact scam has happened to me via Booking.com today and I’ve lost 705.00 waiting for Monzo to investigate I am sick with worry it’s awful. Something needs to be done about booking.com and I think the press/ protests need to be involved it just isn’t fair!

45

Sorry to hear the situation you’re in. Hopefully Monzo will sort it out soon.

From what I understand the issue isn’t Booking.com but rather individual hotels falling victim to attacks, allowing criminals access to their Booking.com dashboard.

So there’s not much Booking.com can do when underpaid and overworked staff click the wrong button. And as long as this remains lucrative, it will continue.

Best thing to do is to use Booking.com as a Google for hotels and then book directly.

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46

You’ll generally be able to get a better deal using this method, too. I haven’t paid booking.com prices for years.

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47

There has been a report concerning this scam here:

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48

A bit worrying that nobody is owning up to it

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49

I don’t think Booking.com will own up to it, people will stop using the service (as they should)

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50

Yeah exactly the same thing happened to me. I’m usually quite aware of these scams but because it came through their official app I thought it was genuine.

Just waiting on Monzo to get back to me. It still shows as pending so hopefully they can just cancel the transaction on their end.

51

A pending transaction being cancelled doesn’t mean the merchant can’t come and collect the funds even if it is cancelled, as it has been authorised, they can collect it at a later date.

52

It hasn’t been authorised though, has it? It’s a fraudulent transaction.

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No, but even so, a payment has been processed and the merchant can still come and collect.

Cancelling the pending won’t achieve anything as it’ll refund, and then possibly get taken again later on.

Edit:

Actually yes, it had been authorised as the customer made the payment essentially approving they want the money to go.

Later realising it wasn’t to the legitimate merchant doesn’t roll back time to unauthorise it.

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54

A cyber security specialist almost fell victim to this same scam, here’s a link to his podcast where he discusses it: What’s cooking at Booking.com?.

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55

This is a widespread problem at booking dot com, I’ve seen it twice recently though thankfully ignored both times.

Best I can tell scammers have access to the internal messaging system but not the actual hotel emails so pretty sure it is booking.com problem but they of course deny everything. They could probably fix it by at least sending a copy of outgoing messages to the hotel and of course plugging the original security problem.

I knew it was a scam when they said something like ‘pay up or your holiday will be cancelled, dear’. Always be suspicious of emails/messages asking for money, esp. with a deadline like pay in the next 24 hours.

56

There’s a new report on this here: Booking.com hackers increase attacks on customers - BBC News

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57

So as suspected, it’s not some sinister plot but just good social engineering. Concerning still but nothing BCOM could do to stop it.

Even though it sounds they can access customer reservation details I believe BCOM mask emails and card details so no actual data breaches should be involved in this unless one falls victim of the fraudulent messages.

For this reason I stopped using BCOM messaging altogether, just emailing the hotel directly if I need to.

I’d like to go direct with hotels but BCOM is cheaper in most cases so :woman_shrugging:

58

I would say the ball is still in Booking.com’s court to get this fixed. They risk serious reputational damage by not acting so it’s in their interest to do so.

2FA would definitely help, but I wonder how the login structure for hotels currently works, I.e. does the hotel have one account that’s shared between staff, or does each staff member have their own booking.com account where they can be granted access to manage the hotel?

If it’s the former then setting up 2FA will require a major overhaul of their systems and could be why it looks like it’s taking Booking.com so long to do anything about this.

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59

Would rather book through official hotel website, can even earn points for miles!

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