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Fake Booking.com listing sent family to a Wetherspoon pub

10 hours ago

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A Loughborough family paid £73 for a London apartment that turned out to be a Wetherspoon pub. Which? says staff turn away 20 tourists a day.

A family from Leicestershire paid £73 for a one-night stay at what was advertised as a luxury London apartment, only to find the booking pointed to a Wetherspoon pub near the Tower of London. Paul Dawson, 55, of Loughborough, reserved the room through Booking.com so his family could see the musical Hamilton in the West End.

The listing, called The London Crown apartments, gave an address that Dawson later traced to The Liberty Bounds, a Wetherspoon pub in Trinity Square at Tower Hill. Consumer group Which? found that staff at the pub have been sending away as many as 20 tourists each day after fraudsters lifted its address and passed it off as a block of upmarket flats.

Dawson made the reservation in August. Two days later, he said, an email arrived from The London Crown carrying a link to a page dressed up to look like Booking.com. The page asked him to enter his bank details. Suspicious, he contacted the platform.

According to Dawson, Booking.com told him he would have to travel to the address and wait until after 7pm before it would move him elsewhere. He said he pushed back, explaining he had already worked out the location was The Liberty Bounds and that no apartment existed there.

"I explained to the support staff that I had autistic children and the idea of turning up at a clearly non-existent property at 10.30pm would have been catastrophic," he told Which?. He said the answer did not change: he was still directed to the property, and told that if he could not check in he should get back in touch for an alternative.

The family eventually booked a room at the Premier Inn in Goodge Street instead.

A second listing at Portcullis House

Which? said the pub was not the only real building caught up in the fraud. The group was alerted to another advert, headed "Apartments near Big Ben", that listed its address as Portcullis House. That building forms part of the House of Commons estate and provides offices for hundreds of MPs.

Booking.com told Which? that in both cases genuine listings had been attacked. The company said criminals had used a "sophisticated phishing attack" to seize control of the entries and redirect bookings.

Wetherspoon said it flagged the scam to Booking.com as soon as the pub team became aware of it. The chain added that the fake apartment entry was taken down but then returned, and that the option to make a reservation now appears to be switched off.

"We have again notified them, asking for the listing to be permanently removed," Wetherspoon said. The company described the situation as "clearly unacceptable" and said fraud of this kind was "upsetting for the pub team, as there is little they can do to help, but even more so for the people who have been misled and have lost money as a result". It called on Booking.com to bring in stronger checks that would stop bogus listings appearing at all.

Hundreds of warning reviews

The London Crown entry had drawn 250 negative reviews across August and September, alongside a small number of positive ones that Which? said were probably fabricated. When the BBC examined the listing on Thursday, its details were still on view but the page carried a notice reading: "We're sorry, but this property isn't taking reservations on our site right now."

Dawson described the episode as a "sophisticated phishing attack", the same phrase Booking.com used about the way the accounts were hijacked. He was left to arrange fresh accommodation at short notice for a trip built around a single theatre performance.

The case points to a pattern in which scammers do not invent addresses out of thin air but instead attach their fake apartments to recognisable, real locations, from a busy chain pub steps from Tower Bridge to a Parliamentary office block beside Big Ben. For travellers, the address on a booking confirmation offered no guarantee that a room existed at all.

Booking.com scam, Wetherspoon pub, The Liberty Bounds, phishing attack, fake holiday apartment, Which? consumer, London Crown apartments, travel fraud

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