Airline and booking services scams intensify during holiday season

Vacation season has arrived, and travelers all over the world are looking for interesting places to visit cheap places to stay, and reasonably priced flights. And scammers are here to provide them with what they require — sort of.

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have noticed an increase in scamming activity, with numerous phishing pages distributed in the guise of airline and booking services. To assist travelers in avoiding scams, company researchers share some of the most common fraud schemes used to entice victims, as well as helpful tips on how to plan a safe, scam-free vacation.

“Planning a vacation is not easy. People can spend weeks, even months, looking for the perfect place to stay and the tickets to get them there. Fraudsters use this to lure users that have grown tired of searching for great deals. After two years of flight restrictions imposed by the pandemic, traveling is back. But so are travel scams – with intensified scamming activity targeting users through fake booking and rental services. Such attacks are totally preventable, which is why we urge users to be skeptical about overly generous offers. If an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is,” comments Mikhail Sytnik, security expert at Kaspersky.

Fake ticket aggregators

Most trips begin with a plane or train ticket, and travel enthusiasts are frequently interested in finding a good deal. Kaspersky experts have discovered a slew of bogus websites claiming to offer users the opportunity to purchase cheap airline tickets. Such websites are typically well-crafted phishing pages that imitate well-known airline services and ticket aggregators. Some of these websites even show real flight details, with experienced phishers sending search requests to flight aggregators and displaying the results. However, rather than providing the promised flight tickets, they keep your money and use your personal information for malicious purposes (e.g. selling your bank details and identifying information on the dark web).