Alisdair Faulkner, chief executive of software company Darwinium, offers advice on how to stay on guard as scammers look to capitalise on flight disruption
The travel and tourism industries have bounced back after the pandemic, but despite global spending reaching over 2.2 trillion dollars, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. As travel spending rises, so does the instances of travel-related online fraud. Action Fraud, the UK’s cybercrime and fraud reporting centre, received 4,244 reports of holiday and travel-related fraud in FY 2021-22, in which holiday fraudsters conned UK consumers out of more than £15m.
Those of us who fight fraud for a living know those numbers are deceptively low since people often don’t report fraud. According to McAfee Corp, 30% of adults have fallen victim (or know someone who has fallen victim) to online scams while trying to save money on travel. Thirty-four percent of those who had money stolen lost over $1,000 before their trip had even begun, 66% lost up to $1,000.
Really, scams continue to be the scourge of the online fraud world. As companies focus on detecting and blocking automated bot attacks, account takeovers, and recognising stolen and/or spoofed identities, fraudsters have turned their attention to other low hanging fruit – in this case, the customer themselves.
Online scams typically involve an element of social engineering, deception or coercion to convince a customer to do something with unintended consequences. When it comes to travel-related scams, common ones include fraudulent websites enticing consumers to book a fake holiday, act on a phony review, or make a payment that goes to a fraudster.
Typical travel scams can be comprised of many different components, including:
● Listing / Content Fraud: When either a website, property listing, or review is fake. Signs to look out for – is this a trusted brand? Have you checked the property location details? What do the reviews look like? If they are too good to be true, or are written in a similar style, do some more checking. Advanced online fraud detection software, which most large travel and e-commerce sites use, can also do image and content matching to check for things like, reuse of an image or text or highly similar images and text, which can alert a trusted platform to potential fraud.
● Social Engineering: Following on from the above, fraudsters will often then try to move a victim away from a trusted platform’s payment protocols, and ask them to make a direct payment from their bank to the fraudster. Things to look out for – if a person is taking you away from a trusted payment platform, be suspicious. Likewise, if you are being asked to make a direct payment into someone’s bank account, consider pausing, and doing some additional checks on this property / booking. Remember that, in regions with faster payment protocols, this money is transferred instantly, and may be hard to track once it has left your account.
Fraud detection solutions can look for things like large payments to new beneficiaries, as well as signs of coercion or social engineering via changes to the way a customer is interacting with their online banking platform.
● Biased or Fake Reviews: Perhaps less pernicious, but still with the potential to mess with a vacation, when the owner of a property or hotel incentivizes customers to write favourable reviews in exchange for perks. We all want to trust the authenticity of reviews, and this type of behaviour breaks that code.
While savvy travellers might consider themselves immune to these scams, it’s prudent for even the savviest consumer to remain vigilant. Airline travellers have had to deal with systemic delays due to weather and a chronic shortage of air traffic controllers that is likely to get worse before it gets better. Ask anyone that has been stuck at an airport for seven hours to fly 2.5 hours away (and that’s a relatively benign example). It can impair your judgment.
Let’s say someone was waiting for hours at the airport only to find out at 11pm that their flight was cancelled and they need to find a place to stay for that evening, quickly. Such situations, in addition to being supremely unpleasant, place even the savviest traveller at increased risk of making a rash or poor judgment on the evening’s lodgings. And as we all know, all it takes is a click to lose your money.
So travellers, check twice before you click. And e-commerce and travel companies, have your customers’ back. It’s one thing to tell your customers they can trust you. But demonstrating your trustworthiness by mitigating the chance of them falling victim to fraud – that’s how you get customers for life. For more comprehensive information and tips on preventing travel-related fraud, we encourage you to visit, the Abta and Action Fraud websites.