Learn how to spot travel phishing

[harlan4096]

Summer’s coming, and that means vacation season is on its way. A lot of people are looking through travel websites in search for interesting places to go, cheap places to stay, and tickets at interesting prices. And, as usual, scammers are eager to give them what they are looking for — sort of.

In addition to the usual tactics scammers use to rob you while you’re looking forward to having a nice vacation, these travel tricks are worth knowing before you start planning your next trip. In this post we’ll dig into some details and talk about how malefactors try to trick excited folks into believing they’re on a genuine travel website. All of these methods were spotted in the wild by Kaspersky Lab’s researchers during late April and early May, and you can thwart them all with three simple best practices.

1. Look at the address bar

The most common advice on protection against phishing is to use simple vigilance, but still, if cybercriminals manage to create a really impressive looking clone of the original website, a lot of people forget this simple step and don’t look at the URL to see what website they’re actually on. And malefactors know how to make us unwary.

For example, take a look at this sweet deal: a nice cozy apartment for just €14 a day. Interesting, huh? And the site looks as if it’s really Airbnb.com. The design, the comments from different people describing their pleasant time at the apartment and being so pleased with the host — everything looks so real. Anything you’d expect to find on Airbnb, you’ll find here.

Except it’s not Airbnb. It’s a fake. If you look at the URL in the address bar, you’ll see something like this: abnb63213491.byethost8.com/rooms/7858853. Doesn’t look like airbnb.com, does it?

The scam usually goes as follows: After a short conversation the “host” will ask you to send a certain amount of money to reserve the apartment for you. Once you do that, they stop responding.

How do people usually get to pages such as this one? Similar offers can be found in spam e-mails, in messaging apps, and in social networks. Sometimes, they pop up in ads on search engines or social networks.

By the way, even though scammers invest quite some time in creating such convincing website clones, they are still mostly lazy. Here’s another example of a phishing Airbnb page, and you may notice that comments here are left by the very same “guests” as on the previous page. Once you know that, it’s tough to take these pages seriously.

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