Sometimes it seems as though the onslaught of hacking attempts and malware never lets up. Recently I became aware of the latest bit of travel related hacking. The accommodation booking site Booking.com has been drawing serious criticism from consumers over the past months for its lack of security measures to protect users from scams. Thousands of people have been alleging that dodgy emails and messages from the site's official portal are swindling people out of hundreds of dollars, and it's becoming increasingly common to fall prey to them.
Booking.com insists that it has not been hacked, but hackers are targeting individual hotels that use the portal. Booking.com warns its hotel partners that criminals are using phishing techniques to gain access to guest data.
"Fraudsters may attempt to mimic our emails in order to phish your username and password for the purposes of taking over your account. These phishing emails can lead to a webpage that looks very similar to the Booking.com Extranet login page–but if you look at the URL address bar, you'll notice differences," Booking.com explains in its warning.
I've been getting lots of these phony emails that attempt to get me to click on a Booking.com link for a verification code. Since I haven't used the hotel website for more than four years, I never fell for it, but it's annoying.
So here's my little rant for the day. As a bookseller, I subscribe to business related newsletters and blogs. Lately I have been getting almost daily requests linking to crowdfunding campaigns for bookstores. Many of these funding requests come from small bookshops that have fallen on hard times for a variety of reasons. In some cases it's owner illness and in many others it's due to a natural disaster. For awhile the financial needs were due to business dropping during the pandemic. In the past I've supported crowdfunding efforts to provide seed money for neighborhood bookstores in underserved areas. In fact, I've promoted some right here on TBTP.
My issue now is the frequent requests for funding from people who are launching a bookstore and simply are asking for booklovers to underwrite their business plan. In one recent instance, two partners who appear to have flourishing careers in non-bookselling areas made an appeal for an enormous sum of cash to fully stock books for their enterprise. To be clear, this is for a bookstore in a major metropolitan area that has many existing shops. I'm all for folks starting new bookstores, and I'm fine with competition for established shops, but why should potential book buyers be funding the stock for a for-profit business.
That's it for the rant and now here's the magic:
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