Surge in travel scams could ruin your vacation: What to avoid
Booking.com is warning of an AI driven surge in travel scams.
Transcript:
A pullback in Nvidia (NVDA) after becoming the world’s most valuable publicly-traded company spread to the Nasdaq and the S&P 500. The Dow, however, finished higher.
Investors digested the worst slump in new home construction projects in 4 years. Higher-for-longer interest rates are hurting the industry.
In other news: artificial intelligence is responsible for a 900 percent increase in travel scams over the past 18 months, according to a Booking.com (BKNG) executive.
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Marnie Wilking, the head of IT security for the online travel company behind Priceline, Kayak, and OpenTable, told a tech conference: “Attackers are definitely using AI to launch attacks that mimic emails far better than anything that they’ve done to date.”
So-called phishing attacks are most popular with scammers. That’s when the perpetrator sends out a realistic-looking email in order to get a would-be victim to fork over credit card data.
Travel sites like Booking.com and Airbnb are particularly vulnerable, according to the BBC, because those sites list personal properties, whose owners can be harder to verify. Victims think they are booking a room, only to find out when it’s too late that they don’t have a place to stay, they’re out of the money they paid, and the scammer has disappeared into thin air.
But AI isn’t all bad. Booking.com says it is using AI to help weed out fake postings.
That’ll do it for your daily briefing. From the New York Stock Exchange, I’m Conway Gittens with TheStreet.
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