Consumer losses from fraudulent restaurant reservations and other online scams cost more than 140 million baht in July, the Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau (CCIB) warned on Sunday.
Fake buffet table reservations on special occasions and public holidays were the most prevalent scam reported to the CCIB’s online complaint center, according to CCIB spokeswoman Pol Col Kissana Phathanacharoen.
He explained that in these scams, a bogus Facebook account posing as a well-known hotel or restaurant was typically used to trick diners into thinking they were being offered a promotion.
He said that in one instance when it was an existing Facebook page, its name had been modified to trick victims into thinking it actually belonged to a well-known hotel or restaurant. These pages were discovered to be either recently formed or ones with a large number of followers, he said.
Then, he claimed, potential victims were identified by searching for hotel or restaurant offers online and making reservations using paid booster posts.
Customers were unable to contact these victims once they transferred a reservation fee to an account provided by the page admins, he claimed.
Online scams involving the purchase of fraudulent products and services were discovered to be the most prevalent type of internet-based scams reported to the CCIB in July.
READ MORE https://www.thaihotline.org/en/news/online-shopping-scams/
