Beware of scams when you book your holiday!

As the holidays get closer, you may be thinking about booking a holiday on the well-known site Booking.com? Be careful because scammers use the platform's identity to trap users.

Booking.com is well known to travel enthusiasts. However, given its notoriety, the site also sees many scams using its identity.

Travelers have received messages via Whatsapp from a company called "Business Link", based in the United Arab Emirates.

It invited the user to validate the details of his hotel to "secure the reservation" and threatened that in the event of non-confirmation, it would be cancelled...

Clicking on the link would take the user to a page called booking.verify-id, followed by a series of numbers, perfectly mimicking Booking and taking up much of the booking data, including the hotel illustration and travel dates.

A fake support service was even set up to push the user to finalize the process, threatening to cancel the reservation.

How does the scam work?

By hacking into hotel websites, scammers retrieve travel information and then go on to steal customers' banking data by imitating Booking through very convincing pages.

What advice?

Let's remember some tips:

The hotel will not send you a message via Whatsapp but will always go through the official platform. Pay only through it to avoid any risk.
Check the reliability of the account you are writing to (if it was created recently, it is a sign of fake...) and the address of the page you are viewing.
Do you have any doubts? Feel free to contact your hotel directly.
Using a credit card limits the risk of fraud.
Also remember to protect your accounts with two-factor authentication.