The most common travel scams in 9 global cities
The travel industry is one of the sectors most susceptible to fraud, with scams rising 18% during the summer peak season and 28% in the winter peak season in 2024, according to a new report.
The report, published last Tuesday by the Mastercard Economics Institute, showed that fraud related to travel agency and tour company bookings is more than four times higher than the fraud average of other industries.
“Once paid, the tour may either never occur or be drastically different from what was promised,” it said.
However, scam risks vary significantly from city to city, said David Mann, chief economist at the Asia-Pacific division of the Mastercard Economics Institute.
“In certain destinations, you can end up seeing a lot more of the fraud coming from the travel and the tour company side. In other cities, it can even be in things like food services. So a good example, over in Los Angeles, [food is] the biggest portion of where we see some of the fraud,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Friday.
According to Mastercard’s data, tourists reported the lowest rates of fraud in San Francisco, U.S.; Dublin, Ireland; Seoul, South Korea; Budapest, Hungary; and Edinburgh, Scotland.
However, travelers to other cities reported higher levels of fraud: Cancun, Mexico; Hanoi, Vietnam; Dhaka, Bangladesh; and Bangkok, Thailand.
The type of scams commonly reported in cities also varies, with taxi and car rental problems comprising just 2% of reported fraud cases in Hong Kong and Barcelona, but 66% in Jakarta, Indonesia, the report showed.
