Beware copycat hotel booking sites

Thank you for posting this phred,

In the past, I have clicked on some of these links when doing research. It seems like they may be at the top of the results.

Good info, phred, thank you. We always try to find a real phone number (or email) for the actual hotel we want to stay at, and never use resellers.

Good warning. There may be a sucker born every minute, but it seems there are two crooks born every minute.

My wife booked a couple nights on a site that looked just like Best western. we were surprised at the cost but it's a busy time of year there & rodeo was in town. She booked it & the receipt email was Guest Reservations (IIRC) She called to cancel & no way no how. Best Western was no help. So we got our moneys worth by loading up on Breakfast ;-))

MarkMg, my husband made the same mistake 2 years ago with the same add on - reservations. He thought he was on the hotels website. Luckily we did stay at the hotel but we are extra careful since then.
Thanks phred for the reminder to be diligent when booking a hotel.

"It seems like they may be at the top of the (search) results."

For those interested, there are many ways to do that.

"Google bombing"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bombing

I got tripped up by this scam once, about 4 years ago...figured it out after the fact, kicked myself...never happened again.

I had to tell Marie to hang up on the "Tech Support from Microsoft" that she found with a google search. He was in the middle of taking over her computer (Windows) and ran into the fact that I'd set her up with a non-Administrator account on her computer. She called me because he wanted the password to the only "Administrator" account on the machine (mine).

But that was a few years ago. It's gotten better.

Thanks for the reminder!

I recently was booking an Accor brand hotel in Edinburgh. Although I am careful and try to make reservations when I am not distracted, I somehow got onto a 3rd party site unknowingly. Booked the hotel room which was completely refundable. When I checked the reservation there was a charge for 399GBP (way more than one night's stay!) so I emailed the hotel asking about it. The staff member was extremely nice, checked it and said..that is a charge from your travel agent. I said...no travel agent involved. I then cancelled the reservation and waited until the whole thing was refunded before moving forward. The whole charge including the 399GBP was refunded within 48 hours so that was a relief.

IF a hotel chain has an app, I suggest booking on that. Which I did after everything was cleared up.

I did do a screenshot of the booking which showed it was completely refundable in case there were issues.

Yup, I almost fell for a look alike Marriot website when trying to reserve at a Residence Inn in Seattle. I got to the payment page and something didn't feel right. I can't remember what it was, but something was sufficiently off that I closed the page, ran an anti-virus scan and rebooted everything, including myself.

It's easy to suddenly find yourself in unknown areas of the internet. And a lot of ways to get there.

One wrong character in the name, or the right name but the wrong link (google bombing, others), or "invisible" Unicode characters in the name/link or...

A lot of ways.

And once you're there it's up to how good the imitation is in executing the scam.

You're so timely! I almost got scammed in Las Vegas last month - the 'Hilton Reservation Website' I searched for had the same logo and interface. Scammers are getting smarter and smarter. I once checked hotel WiFi for reservation information on a business trip, but my colleague from the IT department said that public WiFi is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks and recommended that I carry a little gadget from jammermfg with me when I'm out. I didn't expect that I have to be so careful even when booking on official websites...