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Beware for Scams that may come your way.

Important alerts for holiday cottage owners:

Cheque fraud that we do warn owners about has struck a cottage owner who has been vigilant enough to report it - many thanks

NEW ALERT


I am Mr Silas Carter from Dublin Ireland.I saw your apartment for rent and i'm willing to book a reservation for my client.Tell me if the apartment will be free from 6th to 20th of June 2009 and how much will it cost him and his family.He will be coming with his Wife to make a total of 2 people.Thanks and i await your urgent reply.

Hello , Thanks for your response to my mail.Immediately i got your message,i called my client and he is okay with the price for the apartment and he will prefer to issue the whole amount on the cheque. About the payment,A cheque will be issued and sent to you for the payment because my client is not presently in the state to transfer the money to your account.I want you to send me your details for the check to be issued and sent to you immediately. Name on check: Address: City: State: Zip Code: Country: Phone Number(Home,Mobile,Office): Thanks and i await to read from you soonest. Best Regards, Mr Silas..... (230th Jan 2009)


whilest we cannot be sure that it is dubious - we would advise treating with utmost caution - this seems a very unusual request.




I have had an enquiry come in which is asking if we change locks on the house between renters?? I have my doubts about this enquirer, their first email was in very poor English, second is perfect, sent at 3 in the morning and asking about house locks. Something just doesn’t feel right but maybe people do ask this kind of thing??? The email address is a hotmail one. (26/01/2009)

whilest we cannot be sure that it is dubious - we would advise treating with utmost caution - this seems a very unusual request.



We have had an enquiry and a booking from a company calling themselves Green Village Reservations. The booking was made by a man calling himself Robinson Jackman. In brief, he sent us a bank draft for £2000 more than the required booking fee and then asked us to send him a cheque for this extra money saying it was easier than his clients raising another bank draft. He would have been hoping that we would send him the cheque before the bank draft bounced. We have passed all of our emails to and from him, plus the bogus bank draft, to the fraud department of our bank.

We thought we should let you know in case he tries the same scam with someone else. We have not lost any money, we're just annoyed at losing what we thought was a good booking. (03 July 2008)

more details on cheque fraud scam below:



Cheque scam fraud
cheque scam operates like this:
you will receive an email asking for a long booking for a cottage (often in rather poor English). If you accept the booking they will say that they have to pay a larger sum (as it is a business trip, or some such excuse) and could you then repay the overpayment once their cheque has cleared. Your bank will tell you their cheque HAS cleared but the reality is that it won't have (the banks can in fact reclaim the money for about 6 months after a cheque has supposedly cleared - outrageous I know!). If you repay the extra they sent you then at some point in the future their cheque (which you have been told has cleared) bounces - so you are out of pocket. Our advice is that if you are in any way suspicious of an enquiry then you should just delete it. New scams come up on the internet every day so if in doubt don't respond!



Cottage owners need to be very careful.

We will post information on internet scams on this page for your information. Please bookmark the page, and check in frequently. It is impossible to protect everyone form these Scams, so it is imperative that cottage owners are vigilant and upto date with what people are trying!

We would like to thank cottage owners who send us comments on these things, and indeed who point scams out to us - we need to work together in our own 'web watch' fashion and keep each other advised.



A client has told us of some undesirable guests that he has had in his self-catering property for Hogmanay 2007/8 - they left in the middle of the night, stealing duvets and pillows and leaving the house a complete mess. Hopefully they won't try to contact you but just in case here are their details so you can refuse their booking- linda Price, lindylou@hotmail.co.uk, partner called David and had 2 small dogs.

Most guests are wonderful as you will know, but there are the rare dishonest ones and we do pass on any information to our advertisers that we receive.
(3 January 2008)