Top 5 summer scams to watch out for

 

While scammers tend to be active all year long, there are several seasons that induce a surge in fraudulent activities. The usual Christmas shopping frenzy is one of these seasons, as are the summer holidays.

 

The summer months provide the perfect backdrop for a spike in specific actions, including booking a holiday, looking for a summer job, and attending festivals. Unfortunately, fraudsters are aware of this and have developed various niche scams to gain access to unsuspecting shoppers’ sensitive data and/or money.

 

Read on to discover the five most popular summer scams, how to avoid them, and what you have to do to protect your brand as well as your customers!

  

 

1. Vacation rental fraud

With the surge in demand for a great holiday deal, it’s no wonder that vacation rental fraud is rising. This scam can take various forms.

 

The easiest scam is to post a fake listing on a vacation rental platform like Airbnb or Booking.com, enticing viewers with beautiful images and deceptively good deals. Once the deposit (or the full amount) is paid, the person managing the rental simply disappears.

 

A slightly more sophisticated version of this scam is when a fraudster hijacks an existing, valid listing and leads would-be holidaymakers to a fake website to make their booking. The result is the same: the money lands in the scammers’ account, and you end up without a valid booking.

 

Luckily, there are a few steps you can take to avoid falling victim to vacation rental fraud. First of all, if a deal looks too good to be true, it usually is. If a seemingly perfect vacation rental is available during peak season for a discounted price, take it with a grain of salt.

 

Check reliable rental platforms and reach out to the owners there instead of via the contact details advertised on the deal. Verify the property via booking.com, Airbnb, or any other respectable vacation rental platform. A reverse-image search reveals if the pictures on your listing are used anywhere else online.

 

Take the time to read customer reviews and approach them with caution. A large number of five-star reviews with no or very short written texts may indicate fake reviews, while no reviews at all could also hint at the dubious nature of the listing.

 

Use trusted payment methods. Definite red flags are if the owner wants to take you off the platform for payment or only accepts bank transfers in advance.

 

Read our full guide on how to identify a fake product!

  

 

2. Travel deal phishing

Travel deal phishing can also take many forms. For example, you could get a call from fraudsters or AI-generated voices impersonating travel agents, claiming that your holiday was cancelled or rescheduled and that you need to pay them a fee to process your refund/rebooking. The aim is to gain access to sensitive financial data, i.e., credit card numbers.

 

An entirely different scenario with the same goal is a fake hotel deal. A pop-up ad advertising huge discounts for a limited time appears on your screen, urging you to act before the deal vanishes. But instead of a reputable travel agent’s website, the pop-up takes your sensitive payment data straight to the fraudsters.

 

 

Example illustration of an advertisement for vacation deals

 

 

Whenever someone contacts you, verify their identity before giving them any vulnerable data. It’s better to wait a few minutes while you dial the number of your actual travel agent/airline/hotel to ensure that you’re talking to the right people.

 

Always use trusted payment methods, and never click on links you found in spam emails, unexpected text messages, or pop-up windows. Also, whenever you feel rushed to make a decision by a large, flashy countdown on your screen, take a step back to analyse the situation.

 

Discover trending internet scams and frauds!

 

 

3. Festival/concert ticket fraud

Fraudsters have several tricks they can use to dupe desperate fans into buying fake tickets.

 

Fake ticket webshops are popular with scammers and relatively easy to pull off. All they have to do is register a domain that’s similar to the official one (e.g., it ends with .org instead of .com or has a few different characters in the name, like buytickets26.com instead of buytickets2026.com) and copy-paste information and graphics from the actual site.

 

Users who land on these fake sites are either "only" duped out of the ticket price or, in a worse case, involuntarily hand over their sensitive banking information to fraudsters.

 

Another type of ticketing scam is when fraudsters actually buy you tickets to an event, but instead of the premium seats you were promised, you’ll end up with the cheapest seats in the house. The difference is the "earnings" of the scammer.

 

Similarly, fraudsters possessing a legitimate ticket may sell the same one over and over to different buyers, which means that the first person who actually gets to the event gains entry while all the others are sent home. Since many events operate with electronic tickets and QR codes, this scam is quite easy to pull off.

 

A variation of this is when a person is reselling a legitimately bought ticket on social media without blocking the QR code or barcode on the ticket. This way, fraudsters only have to copy that code and sell the ticket again without ever having purchased anything at all.

 

Find out all about QR code scams!

 

You can protect yourself by only purchasing tickets from registered vendors. Even then, double-check the domain to ensure that you’ve landed on the valid site.

 

If the event is sold out, don’t buy tickets from outside vendors. Instead, check the resale platforms of the registered sellers, and if you decide to purchase something, only use trusted payment methods.

 

 

4. Summer dupes

Summer is the time when the sale of seasonal products surges - and so does the sale of their dupe versions. Dupe products like sunglasses, swimwear, flip-flops, and even food and drink favorites like Aperol flood the market. As a must-have ingredient of summertime aperitifs, Aperol has many dupes and even some lower-priced store-brand "alternatives" that make their rounds at garden parties.

 

Find out how store brands affect your products!

 

Summer dupes are usually advertised in a frenzy of discount countdowns, creating urgency for shoppers to act before the unmissable deals vanish. The images, webshops, and ads featuring them are often deceptively similar to the originals, but when the products arrive, customers tend to find low-quality, different products, or in some cases, nothing at all.

 

Shoppers who want to evade summer dupes need to be wary of unbelievably good prices. In addition, it’s best to check the seller’s reputation before making a purchase. If you can, you should also verify if the seller is authorized by the brand to sell their products to avoid the pitfalls of grey markets.

 

 

A glass containing a fruity summer drink with ice and orange slices

 

 

5. Outdoor gear scams

Similarly to summer dupes, outdoor products also experience a surge in demand during the warmer months. Tents and other camping equipment, outdoor grill ovens, and patio furniture are in high demand, but as they’re usually pricier than regular sunglasses or swimsuits, fraudsters have an even bigger chance to catch shoppers with unmissable deals.

 

Just like with other products, scammers post their listings on marketplaces and run fake ads on social media platforms. They try to draw customers in with big discounts and flash sales to get the products moving quickly. However, just like with the summer dupes, customers ultimately end up with bad-quality lookalikes, fake products, cheap alternatives, or just an empty cardboard box.

 

Protecting yourself against outdoor gear scams is similar to most other types of fraud. Verifying the seller’s identity and authorization is important to ensure that no fake or grey market products make it to your home. In general, avoiding suspiciously low prices is also a good idea, as well as sticking to safe payment methods.

 

 

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How to identify a fake product - a guide by globaleyez

 

The science behind buying counterfeits

 

 

How to protect your brand against summer scams

Getting involved in a scam is detrimental to your brand name and reputation, even if you had nothing to do with the fake products. The best course of action here is to be as vocal about the dangers of scams as possible.

 

Educate your customers on why fake or lookalike products are not a viable alternative to yours, and let them know where they can buy your genuine products without running the risk of accidentally purchasing fake or grey market goods.

 

The first step to preventing scams is to detect them. The online monitoring services of globaleyez do just that. We monitor marketplaces, social media platforms, images, and domains to detect any kind of infringing content as soon as possible.

 

Once we have the content narrowed down, we may need to gather more information about the advertised products or their seller. A test purchase is perfect for this purpose, as it can shed light on the origins of the product and the identity of the seller.

 

Finally, it’s time to enforce your rights and remove the infringing product listings, images, ads, social media posts, and any other content from the internet.

 

 

Conclusion

Summer is here, and along with the good weather come less welcome side-effects, including summer scams.

 

Keep your brand and your customers safe from the dangers of fakes and lookalikes! Contact us for a personalized solution completely tailored to your brand’s exact needs.