Empty house, relaxed guard, personal details floating around the web — holidays are prime hunting season for fraudsters. Cybercrime losses in the US hit a record $20.9bn in 2025, up 26 percent year on year, per the FBI's Internet Crime Report. In the UK, more than 200,000 fraud cases were reported to the National Fraud Database in the first half of 2026, a record for a six-month period, with identity fraud up nine percent on the same stretch last year.

The problem for travellers is that your exposure doesn't start at the airport. Data brokers run people-search sites where, for a few dollars, anyone can pull together a stranger's home address, phone number, age, relatives and property records in one profile. Add a carefree holiday snap from a family member or staff member on social media, and a criminal knows both who you are and that your home is sitting empty. It's not just petty theft — scammers can use those details to convincingly pose as you, impersonate a hotel you've actually booked, or phone your estate manager sounding like you and requesting information before you get home.

Fraud fears are now real enough that cybersecurity ranked as the top concern in a 2025 Chubb survey of 1,000 North Americans with assets above $5m — nearly half said it was the issue most likely to keep them awake at night.

That's spawned a new category of service: the personal cybersecurity concierge. Firms like Incogni Concierge, led by Darius Belejevas, do the opposite of a luxury travel fixer. Instead of getting you into exclusive places, they keep other people out of your data. Clients get a named specialist who maps where the household appears online, writes a risk assessment in the first week, then handles removal requests to the sites publishing personal details — followed by weekly manual searches, because brokers rebuild deleted profiles within months. The service can also ask Google to blur your home on Maps.

The package runs to $4,999 a year for a family of up to five adults and bundles in dark web monitoring, fraud protection, a VPN, password manager, antivirus, a private email alias and a secure phone number. There's also an emergency response team of former law enforcement officers, who escalate to twice-daily scans if dark web monitoring picks up a rising threat.

The logic is simple: the more a fraudster knows about you, the better their pitch — and with AI now tailoring scams at scale using real personal data, even trained professionals pause when a voice that sounds like their child calls in an emergency. As Belejevas puts it, if criminals can't find you, they can't harm you.

For anyone travelling this year — especially with staff, second homes or a visible online presence — the takeaway isn't necessarily to spend $5k. It's to check what's findable about you before you go, lock down who knows your travel dates, and treat a data-broker cleanup as part of pre-trip prep alongside travel insurance and visas.

Reported by Elite Traveler