Cybercriminals are using vacation rental scams to spoil your entire summer, and you need to be careful.
Summer is here, and with it our more than deserved vacations, and although hotels are still one of the main options, it is clear that if you want to spend a long time away from home enjoying the beach or the mountains, you are going to prefer rent an apartment and thereby go to certain vacation rental platforms that exist on the net.
And this is known by cybercriminals, who begin to publish offers of apartment rentals on websites with attractive prices and in very interesting areas so that as many people as possible can get bitten and end up scamming.
However, the Civil Guard has been echoed of some tips from the Internet Security Office so that we do not fall for vacation rental scams for this summer.
In summer they multiply #fraud? in vacation home rental ads.#Don’tPiques with the help of @osiseguro know the techniques used by scammers #SafeSummer2022??https://t.co/dcVws7Y183 pic.twitter.com/uGI22W0KWm
– Civil Guard ?? (@guardiacivil) July 8, 2022
The OSI explains that scammers make use of websites specialized in vacation home rentals to publish job offers that are scams, with apartments that they obviously do not have.
The scammer usually resides in foreign countries, although he usually uses an intermediary in our country to receive the payment and then send it to him later.
The very simple scam, the cybercriminal creates a fake advertisement with photos stolen from other sites and with a very attractive price for the consumer.
The user, who is eager to find a good apartment for his vacation, believes that he has found the bargain of the summer, and contacts the cybercriminal to try to reach a quick agreement and send him an advance payment.
In this case, if the victim finally stings and sends him an advance payment, later, when he tries to contact the owner of the apartment, he observes that he has directly disappeared, keeping his money.
The OSI recommends that bargains do not exist, and that if we see something too good to be true, it is surely a scam.
However, more and more scammers try to balance more the value for money in order not to raise suspicions, so you have to look at the descriptions very carefully because if they contain misspellings or are written in a strange way, it is surely a scam.
Some unwanted problems can also arise, for example that the contact telephone number never works or that emails are even answered from an address other than the one registered on the vacation website.
The user is also recommended to check the authenticity of the advertiser and the property, and even use online tools such as Google Street View to see if the apartment really exists.
The user You should never accept unreliable payment methods or non-platform payment methods in which they want to rent the holiday apartment.
If unfortunately you have fallen for the scam, you have no choice but to report the false offer to those responsible for the platform and gather all possible evidence to then file a complaint with the national police.
Add Comment