Fraudsters even target bank specialists: when booking a hotel, they hoped to deceive a fraud prevention expert | Business

Travelers have to deal with various types of scams. Sometimes vacationers are cheated when exchanging currency, sometimes when buying plane tickets, and in other cases when booking a hotel stay. L. Sadeckas encountered this kind of deception before the vacation even started.

Broken equipment and request for money transfer

“As the summer progressed, my family and I planned a trip to Italy. “When I reserved a hotel room, I had to enter the card details from which the advance payment will be deducted,” says the expert. – After completing this action, I wrote an e-mail as a precaution. I sent a letter to the hotel’s official contacts listed on their website and asked if the hotel was booked and when the advance payment would be debited, as it did not happen immediately.

Company photo/Letter

I quickly received a reply that there was apparently a problem – the accounting department reported that the equipment for accepting advance payments from payment cards was broken and under repair, so the full amount (not the advance payment) was requested to be transferred to the specified account. If this is not done, the hotel will supposedly cancel my reservation.”

According to L. Sadeck, such a letter raised suspicions, because the account to which the fraudsters demanded to transfer the money was not an Italian bank, but a Gibraltar bank.

“When I realized that they were trying to deceive me, I tried to talk to the scammers – to find out why the account of another country was indicated and why they claim that they did not receive my initial payment and now they want not an advance, but the entire amount of the reservation. The scammers kindly thanked me for their concerns, but only repeated the same information. Interestingly, after pointing out the hotel’s rules and asking why they were asking for the full amount, and not just an advance payment, the scammers assured them that both 30% and 50% would be fine for them. amounts, so I can choose how much to pay myself”, recalls L. Sadeckas.

Company photo/Linas Sadeckas

Finally, the expert contacted the hotel administration by phone, who was quite surprised by such a situation and assured that no letters about the additional payment had been sent.

“Since I have to work with similar situations, I informed the hotel administration about the possibility that their e-mail box was taken over by fraudsters and that there may be more victims. I forwarded all the correspondence to them through another channel and received an assurance that the text was not really written by them.

Although such and similar tactics of fraudsters are well known in professional life, I least expected to encounter fraudsters when I was preparing for a vacation in Italy. Because of that, I’ll admit, I even doubted for a moment that maybe I really did something wrong,” the bank specialist does not hide.

An exclusive strategy for extorting money

However, according to L. Sadeckas, this is not a typical case of fraud, as only the official contacts provided on the hotel’s website were used. Also, the expert directly applied by e-mail. by mail instead of receiving a scammer’s letter. After sharing the story with relatives and acquaintances, he realized that most of them would have transferred the money, because they would not have expected that the hotel, writing from an official correspondence address, would try to deceive. Using this strategy, fraudsters convince the person that there was a mistake and the reservation was unsuccessful. In this way, fraudsters try to extort as much money as possible from the victim.

“After transferring money to the account specified by the fraudsters, in the best case, you will be asked to pay an even higher amount, because the fraudsters will claim that the payment has not been received anyway. In the worst case, your bank and account details will be leaked, which will be used to embezzle the rest of your money. When you arrive at the holiday destination, you will still be asked to pay, because you did not pay to the hotel, but to the scammers,” says the expert.

Anyone can get into suspicious situations, the most important thing is to be able to recognize them and protect yourself from them, notes L. Sadeckas.

“While the methods used by fraudsters are evolving, keeping abreast of the latest fraud trends is certainly possible to spot. For example, in this case I was asked to transfer the money to another country’s bank – a reliable company would not normally require me to do this. Also, they will never ask to transfer the money as soon as possible and will never threaten to cancel the reservation,” says the expert.

If you receive similar requests or encounter similar situations, do not immediately trust the information provided in the correspondence. If it is related to disclosure of data, making payments, be sure to check the information with another source, for example, by phone. And if you have already been victimized by fraudsters, contact your bank and the police immediately.