Travel is among the top-10 sectors targeted by cybercriminals using brand names to scam consumers.
That is according to a study by the DNS Research Federation, a not-for-profit digital analytics platform that works alongside the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and is finalising a report – due in October – on brands and cybercrime.
Its research ranks travel and holiday brands as the ninth most-targeted sector, with Airbnb, Booking.com and Emirates described as “super-targets” because they are among the six most-targeted brands across all sectors. Hospitality and leisure was eighth.
DNS has identified almost 900 fake travel and holiday brand URLs in the past 12 months, each involving “thousands or tens of thousands of victims”, according to Lucien Taylor, the firm’s co‑founder and chief security officer.
“Scammers are building websites and fake IDs at an industrial level and using chatbots or mass SMS messaging to engage victims,” he said.
“Our data is indicative but comes from quality threat intelligence and data providers.”
A typical scam could involve a consumer receiving an email appearing to be from a company they just made a booking with.
Taylor warned: “This is beyond the capacity of most brands’ cyberprotection.”
He noted “the scammers are really good at sharing things” but described the level of data sharing by companies to combat fraud as “appalling”.
Fellow DNS co-founder Emily Taylor suggested “a lot of brands don’t share [details of] attacks [and] 60% of people don’t report online crime”.
“Customers are being scammed,” she said. “They’re embarrassed and blame the brand, and the brands are damaged. This is one of the biggest pains of digitisation.”
YouGov consumer research for DNS suggests UK adults receive on average 240 scam emails or texts a year. One in three report scams involving familiar brands.
DNS reports 11% of UK adults admit falling for an online scam, losing £1,169 each on average. It wants to turn its cyberfraud data into “a global resource” for business.
Taylor said: “We’re talking to some of the biggest platforms, but cybercrime is going up and impacting every sector and we need better signals faster.”