Travel scams increase by 900pc: Booking.com

Dhaka: Artificial intelligence is fueling an explosion in travel scams, warned Booking.com as the firm's internet safety head Marnie Wilking, at the Collision technology conference in Toronto, said that there had been "anywhere from a 500 to a 900 per cent increase" in the past 18 months.

She informed, there had been a particularly marked increase in phishing where people are tricked into handing over their financial details since generative AI tools like ChatGPT burst onto the market.

"The attackers are definitely using AI to launch attacks that mimic emails far better than anything that they have done to date," she stressed.

Phishing attacks often try to convince people to hand over their card details through by sending them fake but very convincing looking internet booking links.

After someone makes a payment, the scammers either vanish without a trace leaving the buyer without a place to stay or even try to scam them out of more money through follow-up messages.

These sorts of scams have been around for decades, though they often come with signs of fraud, such as spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.

However, Wilking claimed, AI was making them harder to detect because it could generate realistic images and much more accurate text, in multiple languages.

Therefore, she urges hotels and travellers to use two-factor authentication which involves an additional security check, such as inputting a code sent to your phone. She called it "the best way to combat phishing and credential stealing".

She also called on people to be more vigilant than before when clicking on links.

Despite criticising how scammers are using AI, on a brighter note, she said, the technology was also allowing Booking.com to rapidly remove fake hotels that tried to scam people.