A third of British travelers have spotted suspicious travel scams on social media, according to research commissioned by payment processor emerchantpay and conducted by polling firm Opinium.
The scams follow a predictable pattern: fraudsters steal photographs from legitimate vacation rental websites, post them to social media with attractive descriptions, and request bank transfers — a payment method chosen because transfers are nearly irreversible once completed.
One woman lost £6,500 while attempting to book a Greek villa. She contacted her bank immediately, but was told nothing could be done to retrieve the funds.
Lisa Webb, a consumer law specialist at Which?, said social media firms are failing to address the problem. "Social media firms are failing to take meaningful action to tackle the flood of scams on their platforms," she said.
Major platforms like Facebook and Instagram employ sophisticated systems to detect misspelled drug names and inappropriate content, yet hundreds of holiday booking scams proliferate daily without intervention.
A Which? investigation conducted from summer 2024 through spring 2025 examined reviews on Booking.com and found hundreds of customers reporting they had paid for accommodations that did not exist. Expedia faced similar targeting in 2024. Both platforms issued statements emphasizing the importance of cybersecurity but did not address how victims would recover losses.
George Ralchev, head of risk at emerchantpay, said scammers are "looking to take advantage of peak travel season."
The Air Travel Organisers' Licensing scheme and Abta, the travel industry trade association, provide some protections for bookings made through verified channels, but these safeguards apply only to consumers who know about them and use approved booking methods.
Consumer experts now advise holidaymakers to conduct their own fraud detection, including reverse image searches, cross-referencing properties on Google Maps and checking URLs against known scam databases.
Two-fifths of holidaymakers now alter their holiday behavior due to financial safety concerns, according to the survey. Half now book exclusively through high street or established online travel businesses that explicitly detail fraud protections.
Seven in ten people are wary of promotional holiday emails.
No major social media platform has faced meaningful regulatory consequences for facilitating the scams. No payment processor has had its license challenged for enabling irreversible transfers to fraudsters.
