Bogus travel websites are reportedly duping Google into thinking they are genuine so they can target more than 5,000 British holidaymakers a year with phantom holidays.
An explosion of convincing fake travel websites, which steal photographs of real luxury accommodation, are targeting unsuspecting holidaymakers.
An investigation by ITV Tonight uncovered more than ten fake travel firms which had stolen more than 10,000 images of villas from legitimate travel websites.
The firms, some of which have now been taken down, were listed on Google and could be easily found by searching key terms like “holiday villa” and “luxury holiday”.
Reporters spoke to legitimate firms who were regularly finding British tourists crying outside their villas after realising they have been duped into buying a phantom holiday.
One man who was scammed out of £1,200 for accommodation said he felt “sick” when an airline desk worker told him the same thing had happened to 15 families in the previous day alone.
Nick Cooper, owner of accommodation website Villa Plus, said: “These things used to happen every few years, so they were quite difficult to spot.
“This is the first time that I’ve known, I’ve been renting villas for 30 years, that there’s been an explosion of these websites.”
Figures show the trend is on the rise with 5,826 cases of holiday booking fraud reported to Action Fraud in 2016, up by 20% on the previous year. In total holidaymakers lost £7.2 million to scammers.
However, despite the growing scale of the problem police have said there is no legislation which allows them to rapidly close down the websites.
Andy Fyfe, detective chief inspector at City of London Police, said: “getting websites taken down is not just a case of pressing a button or ringing up a registrar and demanding that the website is taken down immediately. There is no legislation that allows police to make those demands”
A Google spokesman, reported by the Daily Telebgraph, said: “We have a set of policies which govern what ads we do and do not allow on Google.
“These policies make it clear that we do not allow fraudulent or misrepresentative sites. If we discover sites that are breaking this policy, we quickly take appropriate action.”