Return to Uzone News Portal
Uzone.id – The number of victims of online travel fraud continues to increase, driven by the high value of travel transactions and the accessibility of online customer data. This poses a significant risk to travel business owners.
Business owners in the tourism industry continue to handle high-value transactions—hotel bookings, transportation tickets, and vacation packages—and collect personal data online from credit card information to other contact details. They are easy targets for this rampant fraud.
The losses from these online travel scams accumulated losses of up to billions of dollars every year. Data compromise rose 14% YOY in Q1 2024 and phishing became the most common form of cybercrime with around 3.4 billion emails sent daily (source:Identity Theft Resource Centre).
Booking.com has also warned that AI is triggering an explosion of travel scams. The increase occurred by about 500 percent to 900 percent in just 18 months. This explosion is getting more and more powerful as generative AI tools like ChatGPT appear on the market.
Reports show that these travel scams have consistently risen to become one of the top threats in e-commerce. This practice not only incurs direct losses, but also includes chargeback costs, operational disruptions, and reduced customer trust.
How does a travel fraud attack work?
Travel scammers include several fraudulent practices, including email phishing. Phishing in travel perpetrators are good at convincing their victims to hand over card details. They will send you an email with a detailed and attractive booking link that will redirect the victim to a specific website.
Scammers often target websites like Booking.com and Airbnb. Once the victim pays, the scammer will disappear without a trace. Leaving their victims without lodging and transportation. Sometimes, they even have a website that looks genuine, but once the victim arrives at the location, they won’t find anything.
In addition to email phishing, another type of fraud that is no less popular is baggage fraud. Not only luggage and luggage theft, not a few victims were trapped in scenarios related to drug transactions.
How to spot fake order emails?
In the practice of fraudulent order fraud via email, basically the perpetrators aim to get the victim to provide some personal data information. The message will look ‘general; and carefully even write step by step if the victim wants to cancel the transaction.
However, if you pay attention, there are some details that make this scam trick easy to spot. First of all, the email sender address has an unusual domain. For example, by replacing the letter “o” with the number “0”.
Second, the incoming email did not greet the victim by real name. They will only write down small talk such as good morning or good afternoon. Then, the logo of the organization they imitate is also bad and looks suspicious.
Lastly, the perpetrators of this travel email phishing often create false urgency that forces victims to react quickly. The perpetrator often uses words such as, “discount only for today” or repeating the word “soon” to catch the victim off guard.
Scammers know that victims are easily deceived when pressed. So, they create a narrow space for the victim to stop thinking and make judgments.
Data that is often stolen in travel fraud practices
There is one thing that criminals in cyberspace have in common. They often steal victims’ information to then resell it on the dark web. Therefore, data theft such as credit card numbers, insurance, and personal information is often carried out. The value of each data also varies.
For example, credit card information can sell for just a few dollars, but health records can sell for about $50 a piece. And information about a bank account can be sold for $1,000 or more, depending on how much money is in the account.
However, the most popular is data theft regarding credit card numbers. Stealing credit card numbers is the fastest way to collect money. Statista’s Research Department estimates that the value of fraudulent card transactions worldwide will increase from $32.04 billion in 2021 to $38.5 billion by 2027.
