A theatre-goer fell victim to a “sophisticated phishing attack” after booking a “luxury” London apartment, only to discover the address was a Wetherspoon pub.<\/p>\n
Paul Dawson, from Loughborough in Leicestershire, paid \u00a373 for a one-night stay for his family via Booking.com at The London Crown apartments to watch the musical Hamilton in the West End.<\/p>\n
Days later, he said, he discovered the address shown in the listing was actually The Liberty Bounds pub, a Wetherspoon near Tower Bridge. <\/p>\n
Consumer protection organisation Which? said Wetherspoon staff had been turning away up to 20 tourists a day after scammers used the pub’s address as a listing for a “block of luxury apartments”.<\/p>\n
Which? said it was also made aware of a property listed as “Apartments near Big Ben”, with the address given as Portcullis House, part of the House of Commons estate, where hundreds of MPs work.<\/p>\n
Booking.com told Which? that in both cases, listings for legitimate properties had been targeted by a “sophisticated phishing attack, allowing criminals to hijack the listings”.<\/p>\n
Wetherspoon said it had informed Booking.com about this scam “as soon as it came to their attention”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A theatre-goer fell victim to a “sophisticated phishing attack” after booking a “luxury” London apartment, only to discover…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":782343,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-782342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782342\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}