It is becoming easier and faster to reserve an apartment for vacations anywhere in the world, and this is mainly due to the appearance of online platforms such as Booking or AirBNB, but as always there are people who seek to benefit through deception and scam of these types of legitimate services.
The same thing has happened with a house in north London (England) to more than 100 people from all over the world, when they arrived at the address indicated on the page they found the most unpleasant surprise they could imagine.
It all started one morning in July, when Gilian, the owner of a house in North London, heard that someone had knocked on her door. “Someone knocked on my door. I opened it and it was a poor, very tired woman, presumably from Hong Kong, with her daughter at the end of the door, with hundreds of suitcases, it seemed to me, obviously coming from the airport.” She explained to the
The woman assured that they had a reservation on Booking for this house, however, Gillian had never put her home on that platform and feeling very sorry, she asked the two women at her door to leave. A few hours later, another group of people came to her door with the same reservation story.
The next day, Gilian reported in Booking that she had received a visit from several people saying that they had booked her house from the app without her having announced it. After a week, the company removed from its website the advertisement where the address of the house was given.
However, the problem did not end here, and between July 4 and 29, more than 100 tourists who came from Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Australia and Saudi Arabia among others, appeared at the door of this poor woman, saying that they had a reservation and that this was the address they had been given.
For its part, Booking has tried to play down the issue, “We take security very seriously and every week we facilitate millions of stays, most of which are carried out without any problem. Unfortunately, scams are a battle that they face many quarters against unscrupulous fraudsters looking to take advantage, and it’s something we’re aggressively tackling.”
These scams are very dangerous, especially because they are very well designed, but there are ways to detect them, for example, if these people had searched for the given address on Google Maps they would have seen that the images of the house did not correspond to those of the address and would have detected the deception.
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