Fraudulent enquiry!

[Anne]

 Like you Felicity had an enqiry via OD that I am not sure was a scam, not heard from the one you mention but from Margaret.K.White@outlook.com  The outlook address made me suspicious and the mobile phone number given was one digit short so guess it was a scam.

[MartynE]

We had a spate of them last month but they were starting to be really obvious anyway, and thankfully have now dried up. Genuine enquiries are coming through thick and fast now though and the season is now looking even better than last year

[Cosetta]

Almost all if not all fraudulent enquiries had addresses at outlook.com.  They seem to have stopped.  Haven't received any more of them for about 1 month now.  Felicity, your enquiry sounds legit.

[Anne]

We have just had an email from someone who was about to  book our villa but got suspicious, luckily, and managed to contact me direct. I did not receive the normal email enquiry from OD, this must have been intercepted by the fraudster who has been corresponding with the prospective renter for 3 days and nearly got paid.  I then checked my OD account and found the email enquiry but normally I just rely on OD forwarding the enquiry to my email address, I don't check OD for enquiries.  This is the same scam our neighbour had and again the renter became suspicious and phoned her.

Perhaps until OD sort out their scamming problems we have to check our accounts with them to see if there are enquiries that are not getting through to us.

[hobbo]

Ann I think that your email account has been hacked and your emails are being intercepted by a 3rd party, this is a known scam and will require you changing your email password (and any of your email security questions like pets name, as these might also have been compromised) also do a full malware scan of your computer and contact any enquiries in the OD history page that you didn't receive an email from. The scammers use OD by initially sending you an enquiry via OD you respond and in a subsequent email that they send you they get you to click on a supposed PDF word doc or other file, actually this is some form of malware that encourages you to re-enter your email password, this gets logged and hey presto they can intercept all your emails..... Whilst the initial contact was via OD once you are in direct email contact with the scammer it out of their control. Obviously once hacked the scammers pretend to be you and accept bookings collect payments etc. and you know nothing ...  All renters should phone the contact number in the OD advert and confirm with the owner, all owners should check their OD enquiries history and not rely on the emails being forwarded .

[Anne]

Thanks Hobbo, I did change my password straightaway but will change the other security questions as well.  I have also reported it to OD.

[MartynE]

After a lull, we have just had another one.

Watch out for Laura Muarry, email address is not an outlook one, it is gmail this time:
Laura.muarry@gmail.com

Beware!

[felicity]

Yep - had that same enquiry from Laura Muarry...but it came direct to my e-mail address not via an enquiry form....dreaded scammers......