Booking.com regularly engages in fraud separate from scammers, so how can anyone tell the difference?
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/10/15/japan/society/bookingcom-payment-failure/
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Booking is the worst shit company you can cooperate with. We rent out a cabin with them, the second we have enough of our own bookings, we cut them off. They owed us money over a month in summer (they were rebuilding their payout system - WTF??), those f'rs even started taking fee for money transfer (so it costs them nothing) couple years back. Customer support is a joke. I really hope one day they will go bankrupt. Also their idiotic system in which you CANNOT WRITE PROPERTY DESCRIPTION is mental. You fill in the form and they make completely idiotic text out of it and translate it to all languages. So our cabin with porch is Room with terrace and beautiful view to the garden. In the beginning they even try to scam us with some "local tax deduction". I got angry and made them remove it. We have lots of guests who arrive and are surprised, because the description is co plete nonsense. We pay our taxes ourselves, they would simply keep high percentage of our already low money they give us after their sky high commission FUCK BOOKING.COM
I caught them price swapping multiple times last year. Changing the price between the click to confirm and verification screens, not by much, but if they were doing that to every booking, it would be massive. And they made the customer service experience very difficult and drawn out, no doubt to make most ppl give up.
Well, almost fell for it last month while heading for Lisbon. Can't Booking force hotels to use strong 2FA (ie. not SMS-based 2FA) in order to stop accounts takeover?
If they paid with a credit card, would a chargeback vis the bank work in this instance?
Unfortunately most banks' policy is that if you were at the source of the payment (in this example, you willfully entered your credit card information and validated the payment) then they won't refund the payments.
I'm also afraid that people do not realize early enough that they got scammed, they can realize that weeks later.
It depends. I've used a chargeback where I sent a product back for a warranty repair, and the seller stopped responding. The bank just wanted documentation, and they put it through. I imagine you could argue for a chargeback in this case, if you used a credit card.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This kind of fraud has been happening for more than a year, but recently appears to have increased in intensity with hackers taking to the dark web to seek more victims.
Colleen Marples, 44, from the Derbyshire Dales, lost £147 when booking a holiday in Egypt for her husband's 50th birthday in March.
"I believe, as a customer that chooses to use the official platform set up by the company, you can expect a level of security and trust from within that system."
Meanwhile, Ian Robinson, 64, from Cumbria, described how hackers attempted to scam him twice for £122 and then £283 at two unrelated hotels in separate towns, as he booked a road trip in the UK.
A spokesman for Booking.com said that there was no "silver bullet to eradicate all fraud on the internet" but that the company's security team were always monitoring and stopping new threats.
The company said it was also monitoring for suspicious activity on its app and disabling links being shared if the chats appear illegitimate.
The original article contains 529 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 67%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Summary bot have missed the esential line: The booking.com behaved like shitheads and did not took care for money to be returned to the customers, those who lost it not due their fault but due bookings com bad pratice in working with the hotels accounts admins.
In my opinion booking com had to take the responsibility to save their reputation. If it's each hotels account administrator bad practice (week pass, stupid email links opening, ignoring whats hapening with their account, etc...), then hotels had to be made to compensate, if fault lies in bookings.com bad practices working with those accounts managers, the booking had to compensate. Either way those are business'es and they have obligations to their clients. But in their protection – if clients were specificaly stupid, like in opened some dumb shady link to third party payment systems, from chat or something like that level stupid, then client is to blame himself. Each case had to be investigated in detail. P.S. Journalists had to put more effort, not jus report in the style he told this and other he told that and then to leave hanging. That's slightly shitting on everybodies reputation, including the clients, cause probably they could be the dumb ones also. Yet, no clues or details to understand what realy happened there, exept that money been lost – not a good article.