How can I steer clear of holiday villa scammers?

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A beautiful villa can make your holiday... but only if it exists in the first place (Getty/iStock)

Q I heard you talking about “villa fraud” and you recommended checking a website origin for authenticity. How do you do this?

Colin P

A Because travel involves paying upfront for a dream trip, and taking delivery only when the holiday is due to begin, it is a favourite target of scammers. There is an entire industry involved in setting up fake villa sites, usually specialising in Spain, with images pinched from genuine enterprises and words often copied and pasted from real companies.

One scam site is headlined: “Turn Your Spain Holiday Into An Unforgettable Experience!” And for anyone unfortunate enough to book it, that will certainly be the case.

Every year, thousands of people are taken in by scammers, typically losing thousands of pounds each time – and incurring a heavy emotional cost, too, because of a wrecked holiday and the awful feeling of being a sucker. The internet is largely responsible – but fortunately the web also provides easy ways to check the legitimacy of the company.

Take spain-rent.com, one of the latest scam sites. It claims: “We are proud to keep on growing in repetitive clients, challenging us to surpass their previous experiences.” Now, you could simply google that sentence, and find that it turns up on a number of near-duplicate scam sites. But equally easy is to go to a search site such as who.is and see when and where the domain was registered.

The website spain-rent.com was first registered on 13 June 2019 in Panama City. Therefore It is surprising to read: “Every year more and more people decide to book their holiday rental with Spain Rent”.

Next, these scam sites generally carry an address. In the case of spain-rent.com, it is a street in the Costa Brava resort of Lloret de Mar. A quick search of the area reveals that it is a property with a Spar supermarket on the ground floor and a karaoke bar on the upper floor. So decline the invitation on the site to “click with confidence”.

Other tell-tale signs include implausible availability. I made multiple searches for the last week in July, and on every occasion these attractive properties at good prices were available.

And the final clue: the only way to pay is by bank transfer (sometimes described as wire transfer). This is equivalent to giving someone you have never met a large bag of cash in return for a promise. While there are sometimes good reasons for paying by bank transfer, you should do so only when you are completely confident about the destination of your hard-earned cash.

Every day, our travel correspondent, Simon Calder, tackles a reader’s question. Just email yours to s@hols.tv or tweet @simoncalder