Visiting Your Country, Make Online Bookings Fraud.
This online fraud is still unfolding and the all ramifications have not been unveiled as yet. In anycase, do not wait until the entire racket is known. Stay careful now and save yourself from this online threat.
An email is being sent out by a group of fraudsters. The email claims that a certain person (named in the email) and family members (also named in the email) wish to travel for a vacation to ‘your’ country. The country is not named in the email and is referred to as ‘your’ country. The sender of the email requests you to do some bookings for travel and hotels on his behalf.
You are also informed in the email that, the sender will be paying for all the bookings through his credit card. This will be done around 2 weeks before the vacation start date.
This is surely an online scam and it remains to be seen how many people fall for it. You are probably expected to pay for the advance bookings with your credit card. And what happens after that? Let us presume that the email sender does not send you the payment as promised, you could probably cancel the reservations that you made and get away lightly.
The more likely and dangerous thing would be if the email sender actually arrives in your country and does something which is illegal or criminal. The law enforcing authorities will trace back the reservations and find that, they were originally made by you on behalf of the email sender. It could be tough to prove that you are not an accomplice to the crimes commited by the email sender.
Like we mentioned earlier, don’t get curious about the modus operandi of this online fraud. Just ignore such emails and delete them off your system. There is no reason why a genuine traveller to your country, should randomly contact people for making travel and hotel arrangements.