Beware of typing errors when you are looking to make an accommodation reservation on the internet for your holidays: you could arrive on a fraudulent site. In a press release, Mediavacances warns of a new type of fraud, typosquatting.
A new form of fraud targets vacation rental sites. To get you to a similar but totally fraudulent site, cybercriminals rely on your typos or misspellings. The MediaVacances.com platform thus alerts, through its site dedicated to the prevention of tourist fraud, to a new type of fraud, typosquatting. By typing directly in the URL bar, without using a search engine, Abritel instead of Abritel or even auirbnb for airbnb, you risk falling directly on these sites.
Indeed, according to Herv Paccard, manager of the Arnaques-location-vacances.com site and CEO of the MediaVacances group, several .fr domain names, having a close proximity to established sites in the field of vacation rentals, have been purchases. We could thus find on the web the sites abrittel.fr, abrutel.fr and auirbnb.fr.
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According to Mdiavacances, the objective of fraudsters would be to take control of your computer: some of these sites have very little added value for a cybercriminal and it seems more likely that the objective is to take partial or total control of the Internet user’s machine with a view to subsequent fraudulent actions.
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How can you guard against this new form of fraud?
Like everyone else, do you happen to type a little fast on your keyboard and click on the key next to the one you were aiming for? So that these careless mistakes do not have harmful consequences for you, a simple solution is preferred: go through a search engine. By typing your query, even with mistakes, on Google, Safari or other search engines, you will be redirected to the legitimate site. This will avoid unpleasant surprises.
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