A Wetherspoons pub beside Tower Bridge became an unlikely front line in the battle against online travel fraud this summer, after scammers listed The Liberty Bounds on Booking.com as a "block of luxury apartments".
Consumer group Which? found staff at the pub were turning away as many as 20 confused tourists a day, all of whom thought they'd booked a room there. One of them was Paul Dawson, 55, from Loughborough, who paid £73 for a one-night family stay in August at a listing called The London Crown apartments for a West End trip. Two days later, a message containing a link to a fake Booking.com site asked for his bank details.
When Dawson pointed out the address was actually a pub, he says Booking.com's support team told him to go there anyway and wait until after 7pm for help finding somewhere else. With autistic children in tow, the idea of arriving at a non-existent property at 10.30pm, he told Which?, would have been "catastrophic".
It gets worse. The London Crown listing was still live on 23 September, with more than 250 one-star reviews from August and September, many from guests who said they'd reported the scam directly to Booking.com with no result. One Spanish traveller wrote about being stranded with a friend at 2am with nowhere to stay.
Which? also stress-tested Booking.com's AI trip planner, Dot, asking whether the listing was real. Dot insisted it was "legitimate", touting free bikes and parking, and claiming the property was near Longleat Safari Park — which is more than 100 miles from London. The watchdog also found a listing called "Apartments near Big Ben" using the address of Portcullis House, the parliamentary building where hundreds of MPs have offices. Earlier this month Which? even managed to create a fake listing for 10 Downing Street to demonstrate the platform's vulnerabilities.
Booking.com's response is that both properties were legitimate businesses hijacked by criminals through a "sophisticated phishing attack" that gave fraudsters temporary access to their Booking.com accounts. The company says it suspended bookings at both and is supporting affected customers. Which? Travel editor Rory Boland disagrees with how it handled things, calling the requirement that guests physically show up to properties — even when told the property doesn't exist — "utterly reckless". He wants Ofcom, which regulates under the Online Safety Act, to get tougher. The regulator says it has already launched investigations into more than 100 sites.
Why does this matter if you're booking a trip? Because the scam pattern here is a common one: a real property's listing gets hijacked, guests pay, then a phishing message arrives asking for bank details or extra fees. Practical takeaways: pay through the platform, never via links emailed or messaged to you; search the property's name and address independently before you travel; be suspicious if the photos, reviews or location don't add up; and know that reporting a fake listing doesn't guarantee quick action, so have a backup plan for accommodation. If a deal looks oddly cheap for central London, treat that as a warning, not a win.
Story via The Independent Travel.
