Q: Air ticket trick

[mariko]

I had feedback from victims of the scammer I posted on romance scam forum. (Brian Harris / Shaun Logan thread)

They said the scammer tactfully sent them the booking information forwarded from booking sites. The scammer says he is visiting the victims' country, and booked flight and hotel. One of them even called the hotel and found the name exists in booking list.

However, I know the trick of hotel booking. Some booking sites can cancel booking free of charge if not special promotion and have to be pre-paid. I use booking.com and have cancelled hotels due to unexpected issued few times.

But I am not sure of flight ticket trick. Ticket reservation number issued at the point of ticket issued. Then cancellation may be charged? The report showing the flight booking site was edreams.com. Any ideas on this trick? Since scammer never comes to the victims' country, I am sure they want to cancel free of cancellation fees. But cheap flight booking site can do the free cancellation??

[AlanJones]

Scammers never pay for anything themselves, so they probably used a stolen credit card or got a victim to book it for them.

[Mumbles]

edreams.com seems to be broken at this moment, but edreams.net is working.

Also edreams.co.uk.

It is common for scammers to make fake sites to confirm bogus tracking numbers for imaginary shipments, so, it is possible you confirmed the tickets on a fake site.

[mariko]

Alan Jones, Mumbles,

Thank you very much.

The automated email (or fake automated email) was from [email protected].
I do not have copy of email with header from the victim, so I can't see how it came.
But I know in case of booking.com for hotels, user can select email recipients to send confirmation info.
Understand that scammers never want to pay any money, so most likely the flight ticket might be fake. (Only if I could see the email header ...)

edreams.com seems to be an existing online booking company, not fake?

Domain Name: EDREAMS.COM
Registrar: CSC CORPORATE DOMAINS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.corporatedomains.com
Referral URL: cscglobal.com
Name Server: NS1.EDREAMS.COM
Name Server: NS2.EDREAMS.COM
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: serverDeleteProhibited
Status: serverTransferProhibited
Status: serverUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 10-feb-2014
Creation Date: 06-feb-1996
Expiration Date: 07-feb-2015

[mariko]

Finally I got email from one of the victims, and found that both edreams.com and booking.com confirmation emails are not directly from the sites but the scammer forwarded the confirmation email. There is possibility that scammer edited the confirmation email and pretend as if the email was sent to him from booking sites. Issue resolved. I can say with confidence that regarding to booking.com, could be real booking but for edreams.com, could be edited email with the targeted date and the scammer's fake name printed, with the flight ticket reservation #. Thanks!!

[Dotti]

Many booking sites allow you to make a reservation without paying as long as you pay within a certain amount of time.

Scammers take advantage of this. They make the reservation without paying, copy the confirmation email, then the reservation is automatically cancelled when they don't pay.

As others have said, the other way scammers do this is to make a reservation using a stolen credit card number. Again they copy the confirmation email and send it to the victim. Later the booking site will discover the credit card is fraudulent and will cancel the reservation, but the scammer doesn't care because he got what he wanted.