Brussels wants to know why Booking.com's own chat keeps delivering scams
If you have ever booked a room and then received a message inside Booking.com asking you to re-confirm your card details, you have already met the thing the European Commission is now formally investigating. That message is not a crude fake sitting in your spam folder. It arrives through the real platform, in the real conversation thread for your real reservation, quoting your dates and the property's name, because the criminals got in through the hotel's account rather than yours.
The Commission opened proceedings on 21 October, its first under the Digital Services Act against Booking.com, a company classed as a very large online platform since April 2023. There are three strands. Whether it properly assessed and acted on the risk of listings for properties that do not exist, impersonated hosts, and accommodation that breaks local rules. Whether the way reservation and guest data is shared with accommodation providers, together with the design of the messaging service itself, hands scammers the raw material for those messages. And whether listings pushed up the rankings by higher commissions are clearly labelled as advertising. One official, quoted by AFP, called the company's risk assessments since 2023 "absolutely substandard". Booking.com says it is cooperating and that security, trust and protecting personal information are priorities. A finding of breach could carry a fine of up to 6 percent of annual global turnover.
An investigation is not a verdict, and this one may run for years. The part you can act on today is simpler. No legitimate booking needs your card re-entered through a chat message, however convincing the surrounding detail. If one of those arrives, open the reservation yourself from the Booking.com app or website, and if you are still uneasy, ring the property on a number you looked up independently.
No PC tool catches a scam that travels down a legitimate channel, which is why the habit matters more than the software here. What Tendvane can tell you is whether the browser you click those links in has been tampered with, and its "browser hijacked" repair wizard puts changed search settings and extensions back the way they were.