Accommodation fraud works because a hotel booking looks the same whether it is real or not: a page, a form, a card field, a confirmation email. You usually discover the difference at the front desk, in another country, at midnight.
These are the checks worth doing. None takes long.
1. Look at the domain, not the design
A cloned booking page can copy every pixel of a real hotel's site. It cannot copy the domain.
Check the address bar for near-misses: an extra hyphen, .co where the real one is .com, grandhotel-booking.example where the hotel is grandhotel.example, or a real hotel name as a subdirectory of somebody else's domain.
If you arrived by clicking a search advertisement, be more careful, not less. Paid placements above organic results are bought, and they are bought by resellers and occasionally by fraudsters. Get the domain from the hotel's own listing or from a map service and type it yourself.
HTTPS and a padlock prove nothing about legitimacy. Certificates are free and automatic. The padlock means your connection is encrypted, not that the recipient is honest. This is the single most widely misunderstood security signal on the internet.
2. Refuse every payment method that is not reversible
This is the most important item on the list, and if you only do one thing, do this one.
A legitimate hotel or booking platform takes card payment. It does not require:
- bank transfer to a personal or foreign account,
- cryptocurrency,
- money transfer services (Western Union, MoneyGram),
- gift cards, ever, under any explanation,
- a payment link sent by WhatsApp from a number you did not verify independently.
The common factor is irreversibility. Card payments can be charged back. The others cannot, which is exactly why they are requested. There is no legitimate reason a hotel needs your money by an unreversible route.
A deposit request is normal. A deposit request by bank transfer to an individual is not.
3. Verify the property exists, independently
Search the hotel name plus the city on a map service and look at the pin, the street view, and the photographs guests have uploaded. Photographs taken by visitors are much harder to fake than a listing gallery.
Then check whether the same photographs appear elsewhere under a different property name — a reverse image search on the main photo takes seconds and catches recycled listings immediately.
4. Phone the hotel
Get the number from the map listing or the hotel's own site — not from the page you are suspicious of — and ring it. Ask them to confirm the booking reference.
This one call resolves nearly every case, and it is worth making even when you are fairly sure. A real hotel is entirely used to this question.
5. Read the confirmation properly
A genuine confirmation contains a booking reference the hotel can look up, the exact property address, the cancellation terms, and a real, working contact route. Missing or vague versions of any of these are a bad sign.
Check the sending address, not the display name. "Reservations · Grand Hotel" is a label anyone can set; the address after the @ is the thing that matters.
6. Judge the price honestly
A rate far below every comparable property on the same dates is not a find. Enormous discounts, urgent countdown timers and "one room left" pressure are conversion tactics on legitimate sites and bait on fraudulent ones. Either way, they are a reason to slow down.
Specific patterns worth knowing
The fake front desk call. Someone rings your room shortly after check-in, says they are reception, says the card failed, and asks you to read the number back. Reception has your card and would never do this. Hang up and walk to the desk.
The unofficial reseller. Not always fraud, but the practical effect can be similar: you booked through an intermediary who has not paid the hotel, so the hotel has no reservation, and your contract is with a company that is hard to reach.
The public-wifi booking. Avoid entering card details on an open network. If you must, use mobile data.
If it has already happened
Contact your card issuer immediately and ask for a chargeback — this is what card payment is for and there are time limits, so speed matters. Report it to your national fraud or consumer protection body. Tell the real hotel: they generally want to know that their name is being used, and they can sometimes still accommodate you.