Our Inns

Much as we like to think that we would never be taken in by an Internet scam, it’s much safer to assume that at some point you will be and prepare for that.

There’s two basic approaches to this which are 1) recognising scams in the first place and 2) preventing the loss of money if you do happen to be taken in.

To help you with the first one, here’s the latest one that has arrived at the OurInns site recently:

I\’m Charles Strander,i live in UK,I would like to know if your accomodation will be available for rent from the 1st of July to the 15th of July 2008.

email details or call +447045757027.

daddykoboko2@gmail.com

(2 persons)

N.B:The date above may be flexible,so please feel free to let me know when your place will be free for rent. hope to hear from you soon.

Best Regards

Charles Strander

Let’s analyse why this might be a scam.

1. The e-mail address looks a bit suspect, doesn’t it? Some people reject all booking enquiries that use hotmail, yahoo or gmail addresses. They lose a lot of legitimate bookings that way so that’s not foolproof. Having said that “daddykoboko2″ looks quite odd but then again, whilst that’s an indication of a possible scam, it’s not positive proof.
2. The grammar is poor. Don’t worry about the “I\’m” because the odd characters can be inserted by mail programs. “i live in UK” might perhaps indicate a non-native speaker of English yet the name seems very English and it’s that conflict rather than each individually that is another indication that it might be a scam.
3. “your accommodation”: it’s not specific as to your place ie it doesn’t say “your B&B” or “your villa”. However, normal bookings aren’t always that specific either.
4. “from the 1st of July to the 15th of July 2008.” is quite a long period and long rental periods are another indication of a possible scam although this is dependant on the normal period which people stay with you.

And that’s it. You’ve four separate things that indicate that it might be a scam but even together that’s not really conclusive. In fact, the only way you’d know is if the booking came through a listing site and they told you that there’d been 100 or more booking enquiries from this person.

In fact, of the people that received this about half considered it genuine and replied whilst the other half were convinced that it was obviously a scam and the majority of these people have been in the business for quite some time.

OK, so chances are that you are going to be taken in by one of these scams at some point so what can you do to protect yourself?

At the end of the day the scams operate by taking money off you in some manner so the simplest thing to do is to only refund in a like manner. So, if you’re paid in cash return the same cash in case it’s forged. If you’re paid by credit card, process it as a refund to the same card. If you’re paid by bank transfer, refund by bank transfer to the same bank account.

Where this process breaks down is in two basic areas, notably with cheques. Some scammers try to get you to take payment by a cheque drawn on a foreign bank and then refund them in some manner. The problem is that it can take six months for a foreign cheque to fully clear and, of course, who would expect anyone to wait six months for a refund? To avoid this, you either need to refuse foreign issued cheques or to impose a six month moratorium on refunds from cheque payments.

The second area where you can get problems unexpectedly is with bank transfers. Obviously you need to give the person details of your bank account to receive these and the problem is that the same details can be used to withdraw money. All banks will tell you that this is impossible. It isn’t. The way to protect yourself from problems in this area is to quote the number of a savings account as they can’t use the fraud schemes to withdraw money from these. If you’re really paranoid (and it’s safer to be) then use a savings account in a separate bank and keep the balance low.

The upside of all this is that once you start receiving scam e-mails it’s a good indication that your marketing is working.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Finance, Internet, Owners. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.