New Booking Scam: This Message Could Ruin Your Summer

In a few days, a new scam has taken hold of thousands of people’s mobile phones. In particular, those who have the Booking app installed and have confirmed their booking to enjoy their well-deserved summer holiday. The scam was reported by OCU (Organization of Consumers and Users) through their social networks, which reported a serious case identity theft and attempted fraud.

What’s happening? The OCU warns that there is a group of people posing as employees of the hotel where you have booked your holidaywhich state that certain information must be filled in to confirm the booking, and warn of possible immediate cancellation if the information provided is not confirmed.

After filling out a couple of messages, users are redirected to an external Booking page. fill in a number of details, including banking and personal information.

And as you can imagine, once this data is sent, the balance of the linked accounts will change. danger of being stolen in a matter of minutes.

No SMS, no email, messages come from the Booking app itself.

As the OCU correctly reports, the real danger of this scam lies in origin of messages, that arrive in your Booking inbox, just like how accommodation providers usually inform you about real changes to your booking. It’s easy to spot these types of scams via SMS, but things change when Notifications are sent from the platform you booked on..

How is this possible? Although there is no official information, it is possible that the scammers succeeded bypass booking securityhave access to the platform’s messages and view information about accommodation bookings. From there, they only need to contact users and pretend to be a hotel that they reserved themselves.

And of course, many users easily find SMS messages of dubious origin, in which they ask you, for example, to immediately go to the bank and pay a fine, but The mistrust disappears when a scammer uses the same platform to try to scam you.The public has been warning about SMS scammers for months, but a message sent via Booking, in which they pretend to be the hotel where you are going to spend your holiday, is too confusing.

Without a doubt, this is one of more sophisticated fraud and it is best implemented that the user may encounter as he plays with Trusted by the leading hotel booking servicesome real information about your holiday and the possibility of losing the accommodation that was confirmed and paid for several months in advance.

How to avoid such fraud?

With a scam as well thought out as this one, the recommendations pay attention to every detail or ignore the SMS you receive. Using Booking’s own messages already creates enough trust, so if you receive something like this, we recommend you trust it. actions that you can do yourself.

That is, the decisions you make, such as, Find the phone number of the hotel you booked and call them to report the problem.It is no longer enough to be on guard: you must distrust any message that reaches you by almost any means.