As AI fuels a surge in journey scams, this is how one can defend your self

MONTREAL — Mark Kalinowski’s dad fell for a basic journey rip-off.

“Someone called one day and said, ‘Hey, good news, you won a trip to Florida. It’s all paid for. Just pay that $200 upfront holding fee,’” Kalinowski recalled from his residence in Calgary.

“He’s like, ‘Oh yeah, let me give you my credit card.’”

His dad did not sweat the loss, which occurred over a decade in the past. But since then, the stream of journey scams has grow to be a flood, posing pitfalls that vary from faux web sites to phishing emails, phoney trip listings and hacked loyalty factors.

The Association of Canadian Travel Agencies and Travel Advisors, together with different trade teams overseas, has warned a few proliferation of rip-off and fraud makes an attempt over the previous a number of years as synthetic intelligence instruments increase the vary of felony alternatives.

Online journey big Booking.com stated in 2024 that AI had fuelled a rise in journey scams of between 500 and 900 per cent over the earlier 18 months.

That identical 12 months, Flight Centre Canada advised The Canadian Press it labored with Google and different search engines like google and yahoo to take down greater than 200 fraudulent listings on impostor web sites in only one month after the search outcomes started showing in on-line queries for the journey company.

Kalinowski, a monetary educator on the Credit Counselling Society, says would-be clients must be cautious of on-line adverts that hyperlink to third-party platforms posing as a resort or airline.

“Scams are becoming more prevalent. People from all different segments and classes and cohorts of life fall for them. It’s not a question of intelligence,” he stated.

Some fraudulent web sites take images and knowledge from resort, airline and cruise websites to create the impression clients are reserving by those self same corporations.

“If you book from one of these sites, there’s no guarantee you’ll get the room you paid for, and you may not find out until you arrive at the destination — and by that time, your money is likely gone,” Toronto-Dominion Bank warned in a put up about journey scams on its web site.

Fraudulent postings on trip rental platforms pose comparable dangers.

“You’ll think you’re booking an Airbnb or VRBO, and there’s just nothing there when you arrive on the other side,” Kalinowski stated.

Other telltale indicators of a journey rip-off embrace offers that seem too good to be true, high-pressure gross sales techniques and requests for cost exterior ordinary strategies, resembling wire transfers slightly than cost by the Airbnb app, for instance.

Kalinowski remembers one advert, supposedly for Southwest Airlines, that bundled these first two crimson flags — a tempting supply and urgency — collectively by providing free flights to the primary 500 individuals who booked through a selected web site.

“I don’t know when the last time you had a free flight was,” he said.

“It’s been a long time for me.”

Other potential tells embrace a request to pay through reward playing cards or cryptocurrency, slightly than going with safe cost strategies resembling bank cards, which frequently supply safety if one thing goes awry.

To guard in opposition to scams, travellers ought to take care to go to a resort, airline or cruise line’s precise web site by typing it in straight or at the least double-checking it slightly than clicking on an advert. They also can guide by a well known journey company.

Customers can discover additional peace of thoughts by contacting the supplier — the airline or resort, for instance — afterward to confirm a reserving.

To keep away from bogus trip leases, seek the advice of evaluations and do a Google Street View search to verify the deal with, stated Pat Pellegrini, CEO of client analysis agency Vividata. A reverse picture search also can reveal if these images of a luxurious beachfront patio are copied from one other web site.

“There’s a lot of bad players, so it makes you have to do a lot more work,” Pellegrini stated.

Among these dangerous actors, loyalty factors stay a chief goal, usually through AI-driven phishing makes an attempt.

“The odds of you getting a phishing email that’s looking for your credentials, and they’ll just keep trying to throw stuff at you until they get through, are very high,” Pellegrini said. “Loyalty points have been taken in the same manner.”

Phishing — emails, texts or calls that trick victims into handing over banking particulars or different delicate data — noticed an particularly large surge lately, based on Booking.com. Phishing messages are sometimes identifiable by their use of pressing or threatening language, requests for monetary information and spelling or grammar errors.

For those that do get scammed, report it to native police, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, and the platform that hosted the rip-off — Google or a short-term rental platform, for instance — advises RateHub, a web based comparability web site for monetary merchandise.

Victims also needs to attain out to their financial institution or bank card firm as quickly as potential to attempt to freeze the cost in addition to any compromised accounts, and to watch for suspicious transactions.

Victims can then notify credit score bureaus to flag potential modifications to their credit score file.

This report by The Canadian Press was first printed May 7, 2026.

Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press