2024-07-04 15:40:49
UFC-Que Choisir said, some customers who made a deposit in France or abroad on the famous site were the victims of fraud.
As the summer holidays approach, which officially start this Saturday for all French students, it is good to be careful to avoid the increasing scams. This WednesdayThe UFC-Que Choisir team points out that it has received many reports from victims of the latest and most inventive scam, which targets customers of the online platform Booking.com.
The process is simple: people who have reserved a residence on this website receive a message from scammers, who have received the identity of the establishments listed on the platform. So customers are advised to receive email from their hotel or vacation rental. This “The message sent by the official Booking email address asked me for confirmation of my reservation under penalty of cancellation, “my card was not able to be verified”, said one of the victims. The message had all my contact details, dates, booking number… it was perfect in content and form. I went to the link provided and, somehow, I found myself on the official Post website where I was asked to confirm my bank details.he said.
However, this link is not directed to the official site, but to a copy (the difference is by URL). Once on this fake site, the customer enters their bank details and approves, of their own free will, a false confirmation payment that should be reimbursed quickly. The page shows an error page saying that the payment didn’t go through (even though it went through). The victim then repeats the operation, and is scammed a second time. Thanks to this process, and a lot of verification of payments by the customer, the scammers pocket hundreds or even thousands of euros for the victim.
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The difficult question of victim compensation
Requested by the customer group, Booking.com refused to compensate the victims, since it considered that the fraud occurred outside of its website hosting. The vacation rental site says «[renforcer] always [ses] your own security controls”. You remember that“As a general rule, no legitimate transaction requires a customer to provide their credit card details over the phone, text or email. If a guest is in doubt about a payment message received, we encourage them to check the accommodation’s payment policy, available on the accommodation’s listing page, or to contact us directly. THE banksfor their part, do not automatically reimburse the victims.
At this time, it is not possible to know how many people are affected. The website Booking.com was not chosen by chance, however, because it is the most used site in France in 2023 (29.2% of online e-travel buyers according to Fevad research). Contact us, the platform has not yet returned to us.
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