Summer travel scams heating up

Planning your summer vacation? Cybercrooks are hard at work trying to ruin it.

Hospitality website Booking.com is warning that cybercriminals, armed with sophisticated artificial intelligence tools, are spreading phishing emails that look like they come from real travel sites. The goal is to get recipients to reveal personal information with credentials to their financial accounts. Marnie Wilking, Booking.com’s chief information security officer, told news agency AFP she’s seen a 500% to 900% increase in suspicious emails recently.

And the Better Business Bureau says it’s seen an uptick in bogus airline ticket websites promising cheap flights. The bureau says typical signs that a website is a scam is it has “no working customer service number or physical address.”

Paper chase

Walmart is embarking on a major project to replace paper price tags on its store shelves with digital shelf labels. The digital labels can be updated by employees with a mobile app, so price changes that used to take two days to update can be done in only minutes, Walmart says. Walmart expects to have the digital tags in about half of its 10,000 stores by 2026.

App spending sets record

Consumers spent $35 billion on mobile apps in the first quarter, an all-time high, according to app-tracking firm Sensor Tower. Entertainment apps, which include social networks and streaming services, were the No. 1 grossing category. Overall, TikTok was the highest-grossing app, bringing in $1.2 billion in the first quarter. TikTok has been the highest-grossing app for four straight years. Monopoly Go was the highest-grossing mobile game.

Amex buys dining reservation service

American Express agreed to acquire Tock for $400 million from Squarespace, adding a service that helps customers book dining and other hard-to-get reservations at exclusive venues. Tock is known for catering to high-end restaurants, including New York City hot spots Per Se and Jean-Georges. Restaurants are a major spending category for Amex customers, exceeding $100 billion in volume last year. — BLOOMBERG NEWS