Booking flight tickets and making hotel reservations need only be a click away and can be completed in next to no time.
But the tourism bureau of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications and the Net Consumers Association (NCA) indicated yesterday that there is an increase in online travel fraud, where criminals use the names of legal online travel service operators and set up unauthorized Web sites to fool consumers into purchasing fake travel packages.
NCA chairman Lin Shih-hua (林世華) said these false operators often require customers to pay the entire sum up front.
After receiving payment, they then do the booking with legal online operators, but the customers receive nothing and the fraudsters sell the tickets or hotel reservations to somebody else for a mark up.
Legal online travel service operators were also represented at yesterday's press conference claiming their names had been abused in cyberspace.
Keiko Takakuwa, manager of iTrip Travel Service Co, said someone managed to create a Web site that used content listed on iTrip's home page.
Instead of using "itrip" in its URL address, it used "ltrip" to confuse customers.
According to Takakuwa, iTrip did not know of the scheme until it received calls from customers asking if the company really offered 50 percent discounts on any package tour during the Lunar New Year.
Chang Shi-chung (張錫聰), director of the hotel, travel and training division in the tourism bureau, said that the warnings were well-timed as many make travel arrangements for Lunar New Year.
Chang said that besides fake travel service Web sites, the bureau also discovered Web sites promoting hostels that do not actually exist.
Customers are being encouraged to report these frauds and the NCA has designed an anti-fraud icon featuring the word fraud (
Hsiao Su-yun (蕭素雲), representative of the Consumer Protection Commission at the Executive Yuan, said yesterday that the commission had asked some of the major portal operators in Taiwan, such as Yahoo-Kimo! and PCHome, to filter out so-called "Virtual Hostels." She said they were willing to cooperate with the government policy.
"But the problem lies in the way most people find hostels," Hsiao said, "where they enter the word `hostel' in search engines and a list of hostels appears, be it real or fake."
Hsiao cautioned that the fraudulent Web sites tend to show impressive pictures of the hostels and offer deals for unusually low prices.
They usually give a mobile phone number as a contact, without listing the address of the hostel or any other phones lines.
Kao Da-yu (
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