Travel scams enhanced with A.I. on the rise this holiday season

Cybersecurity experts warn that travel scams enhanced with artificial intelligence (A.I.) are on the rise this holiday season. 

Karen Zilberstein is with Guardio, a cybersecurity firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel. She says scammers are using A.I. to create realistic-looking texts, emails and even websites.

“With the surge of A.I., we’re seeing an increase in the quality of scams,” Zilberstein said. “It’s really easy with generative A.I. to compose texts that are very similar in tone and language to the original emails or text messages you will get from legitimate venues like booking sites or booking platforms.”

Zilberstein showed FOX 5 a fake website scammers created that looks nearly identical to Airbnb’s website as well as several false booking sites.

“We are also seeing that with fake websites, websites look really real. They show real venues that have been scraped from other real websites,” Zilberstein. “They show pricing that looks and feels legitimate. They have reviews from what appear to be real people. And the differences would be so minor that the human eye can no longer detect them.”

Zilberstein says users need to be vigilant when booking travel or responding to any messages from a booking site.

“Many times in travel related scams, people will be asked to maybe pay an extra fee that did not appear on the original booking or the website,” she said. “The fake website will ask for their credit card details again to double-check them, and that will be some easier ways to get to financial loss.”

Bottom line: beware of messages saying there are extra fees that you didn’t pay when booking. And if an email or text has a link to your booking, instead of clicking it, just go to the website yourself to verify it.