Mysterious Leak of Booking Reservation Data is Being Used To Scam Customers

For almost five years, Booking.com customers have been on the receiving end of a continuous series of scams that clearly demonstrate that criminals have obtained travel plans and other personal information customers provided to the travel site. From a report: One of the more recent shakedowns happened to an Ars Reader who asked not to be identified by his real name. A few months ago, Thomas, as I'll call him, reserved and paid for a two-night stay scheduled for this July in a hotel in Italy. Last week, out of the blue, he received two emails. The headers show that the first message came from the genuine Booking.com domain. It purported to have been sent on behalf of the hotel in Italy and asked that he click a non-existent confirm button for his upcoming stay. It went on to inform him that the hotel would "also transfer all bookings made from that address to your account." As phishy as that sounds, the email included his full name, the confirmation number of his reservation, the correct name of the hotel, and the dates of the stay.

third-party vendors (how much info does hotels)

[Joe_Dragon]

third-party vendors (how much info does the hotels) get from booking.com?

Re:

[geekmux]

third-party vendors (how much info does the hotels) get from booking.com?

To be honest, I hope they don't get the information that has been leaked here.

That way, we can dispel with this whole "mysterious leak" bullshit and put the blame where it likely is.

Their employees are selling data on the darkweb

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm told it pretty easy to find, and it seems to be coming from the H1B's that they hired.

Re: Their employees are selling data on the darkwe

[registrations_suck]

The H1B's what?

Booking com and your credit card number

[eminencja]

Not so long ago booking.com was the greatest user of fax machines - that was because credit card companies forbade sending credit card numbers by e-mail but it was still OK to fax them; so booking would fax your credit card to the hotel where the (possibly unattended) fax machine at the (possibly temporarily empty) reception desk happily printed it out for everyone to see. (And then the hotel would pay 15%+ commission on your booking). It had always amazed me that some more technologically savvy company - s

Re:

[sound+vision]

I worked for a company providing certain "tech solutions" to hotels a few years ago. All your booking information is getting shot back and forth from vendor to vendor to vendor any time you stay at a hotel.

The more digitized the hotel's systems are, the worse it is. Anything that it's physically possible to track, is tracked. Every time you open or close the door, when you turn on the lights, what time you leave in the morning, what time and what food you order for dinner. It's sold to hotel management as "

Seems booking.com does not care...

[gweihir]

Because if it happens this often, it becomes easy to trace it. There are enough techniques to mark different instances of the same data to see who leaked it.