Online scammers who are specialized in renting fake or non-existing vacation villas and apartments are prospering. Statistics collected by the Spanish Ministry of Interior indicate that cheating cases concerning accommodation bookings increased 29.7% in 2024 from the year before. Other key findings were that professional criminal groups are taking over business from independent amateurs, and scammers are making extra revenue by grabbing tourists’ personal data as well.

Many reports (scamming tools for sale, cyber criminals are stealing Airbnb accounts, an artful cheat) in the last few years have proven how difficult, or even impossible it is make large online vacation accommodation booking services safe. And this is only the beginning because the Spanish Police has noticed that recently professional, well-organized cyber criminal gangs have begun operating in the rental scam business.

Why crime groups are moving into travel scams? The con is fairly simple to do, and it is a low risk job – although the payout from a single successful job tends to be relatively low.

Here is how the most common rental scam works at the moment. Criminals create an account on Airbnb, Booking.com or on another popular online travel service. They search for pictures of an apartment or villa from the internet. They fill in the required information for the new property to be listed on a rental service. The information provided may be fake, or real data copied from an existing property. Then, criminals wait until a tourist requests a reservation. Now, the key thing the scammers want is to divert the traveler to pay for the reservation outside the service. This ensures they get the money without delays, and the reservation service can’t freeze the payment. If the criminals manage to convince the tourist to a payment directly to their bank account, Paypal or to another account, they have succeeded.

Since professional criminals have entered the scene, a new threat has emerged: personal data of victims may be stolen as well. The Police has already discovered that personal information of victims has been used to represent the information of property owners in fake listings. In addition, there is a large market for personal data in the online ad tech business.

Why haven’t Airbnb and Booking.com done enough to stop scams like these? It is practically impossible for them to stop the cons because of the way these large online services operate at the moment. A person can sign up to the service as a property owner, list his or her apartment for rent, and it is done. No one verifies if the property exists in real life, or if it is as described in the listing.

That’s why our traveling team books directly with the hotel, camp site, or other property when we need accommodation.

In any case, there is something you can do to make reserving a vacation apartment a little safer. The Police in Spain advises travelers to always keep the following in mind when booking vacation accommodation:

• Do not share your ID or bank details if you can’t be sure who the other party is.
• Ask for apartment’s tourist registration id, its location on a map, and additional images.
• If you want to use booking services like Booking.com or Airbnb, do not make payments outside of the service.
• Save emails, links, screen shots and all messages with the person who represents the property.
• Always check the website address of the page where you are before doing anything. Fake platforms can easily imitate the overall look, logos and colors of the real page, but real web addresses can’t forged.
• You may use reverse image search (for instance, Search by Image, Bing) to check if the photos have been copied from another ad or from another web page.
• And above all, don’t make hasty decisions even when you are being rushed to do so.