The chairman of an anti-fraud group has urged agents to take advantage of more effective preventative systems to help overcome the rising tide of scams.
Barry Gooch, chairman of Prevention of Fraud in Trade (Profit), told a Travel Weekly webcast that many agents don’t have sufficient defences against fraud and don’t realise it is happening until it is too late.
He said Profit has been urging agents to harden their businesses against fraudsters through bodies such as Abta and the major consortia but added: “Until it actually happens and is identified by a company, they often don’t realise it’s going on and therefore don’t put the measures in place.
“We get called in quite often to companies, and it’s stuff that could have been overcome, if they had just put in some basic free systems.”
He disputed suggestions on the webcast that scammers are becoming more sophisticated, adding: “There’s nothing sophisticated about the way they commit fraud. Basically, it’s just that agents don’t put in the defences to stop it in the first place.
“A lot of it is organised. And people would be really surprised if they use the intel system, they would see that it is organised.”
He said a scammer approaching an agency could have done so a hundred times under different guises and stolen or cloned IDs.
“They’re always the other passenger, which is why your verification tools don’t pick it up,” he explained.
“Because [agents] only look at the lead passenger or the payment, they don’t look at the other passengers, which our retail system does. They add themselves to the bottom of it.
“You’d never know, you’d never pick it up any other way.”
The webcast also discussed the growing problem of fraudsters using Abta numbers and other trade identifiers.
Gooch commented: “In 2014, we presented to all of the consortia a way of protecting the numbers, including Atol, and none of them have done it.
“It doesn’t cost anything for any brand, or the consortium to sign up to the Digital Millennium Copyright service, which then tracks those numbers.
“Unfortunately, none of the consortia was interested enough to take it up. And I don’t know why.”
He explained how Profit analyses “millions and millions” of payment records that the airlines and agents put into its system to help it issue alerts.
“We’ve had instances where airlines and agents from different consortia have all had exactly the same booking attempted to them; some of them have picked them up and others haven’t,” he said.
He said Profit’s service won’t stop fraud but it will help the industry to be more resilient.
“We need people to come on board. It’s what intelligence is about,” he told the webcast.
Jackie Steadman, owner at TravelTime World, told the webcast how she feels there is a “targeted attack on travel”.
“There is so much data out there that they can glean from our website: they know who our staff are, they know your telephone numbers, the hours that you’re working. It’s very easy to build up a relationship,” she said.
“They build the relationship over a couple of weeks, getting quotes, getting a price…’my son wants to go to Bangkok, it’s fine, I can pay, it’s business class’.”
She said the agency will ask a suspicious caller certain questions, such as how they found the agency, and explain how the agency can only take a bank transfer for late bookings instead of a credit card.
“Bang. That’s usually the end of the conversation,” she told the webcast.
Gooch also cautioned agents against sharing details of potential fraudsters as it could contravene General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules.
He detailed how Profit’s intelligence system was developed with the Information Commissioner’s Office and two law firms to ensure it complies with data regulations.
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