Do not Check into this Hotel

There is this hotel which you should never check in. No, I am not talking about any haunted hotel; it’s a new mail that’s making the rounds. If you get an e-mail message telling you a hotel has erroneously charged your credit card account, better be careful.

Many of us, out of curiosity, will go ahead and click it, after all curiosity killed the cat. Once this is done you will start getting messages with a common theme – a hotel wrongly charged a credit card number and the victim is supposed to fill out an attached form to process the refund. One such message title reads, “Hotel Breakers Palm Beach made wrong transaction.” And the mail reads “Please see the attached form. You need to fill it out and contact your bank for return of funds,”

But hold onto your horses -there is no monetary transaction happening anywhere. The ‘refund’ form is actually a malicious Trojan horse program that installs fake antivirus software on the victim’s computer.

The messages seem to be coming from the same botnet of infected computers that recently sent out similar messages warning victims that their credit card payments were overdue. Talking about money to trap users has been the most used trick by spammers.

But any unsolicited message that includes an attachment should always be treated as suspicious. Fake antivirus software is a major annoyance. It points out bogus security problems on a victim’s computer and keeps pestering them until they pay out money. Those little pop ups that keeps popping up in your computer are nothing but a cue to your computer and credit card.

Consumers who aren’t sure whether these messages are legitimate should use Google to find the company’s website and then call them, security experts advise.

So this time, if you receive a mail telling you a hotel has erroneously charged your credit card account, be careful- it might not be the best places you would want to check in.