Holiday Rental Fraud comes to Costa Blanca
Rental fraud is on the increase
and the latest scam has affected many Costa Blanca visitors.
This one involves a number of holidaymakers who booked holiday rentals in
Moraira and Javea through
www.morairaway.com which advertised in several direct-from-owner
advertising websites.
A recent article in the
TimesonLine Website explains that this rental fraud has already topped £500,000 and
may eventually total several millions.
The British police are in touch with the holiday rental websites and contacting
all who enquired with MorairaWay.com in order to discover how many actually
booked and paid money.
One holidaymaker took the trouble to fly out to Javea and found that the
villa he rented does not even exist.
Read the full article:
Britons lose Spanish villa holidays . . .
Meanwhile the BBC Website
reported that there have been arrests and the British police are
investigating a number of other holiday websites suspected of the same fraud.
Read the full article:
Holiday fraud suspects arrested . . .
This type of fraud, which is so
easy to carry out, will probably become more common now that it is not so
easy to earn profits by legitimate means, due to the worldwide recession.
Quite possibly the scams uncovered so far are just the tip of the iceberg.
Why is it so easy for the
fraudsters?
Looking at
www.morairaway.com,
which is hosted on the GoDaddy Internet Server in the USA.
The Internet Community normally does have a remedy for identifying all website owners
and these are available, via the "Whois" service on the domain name
registries.
However, in the case of
www.morairaway.com
it is not so simple. The owner, technical representative and billing entity is
http://domainsbyproxy.com/
This is a website which makes it possible to
secretly register a domain name and circumvent the laws regarding domain
name registration. They say on their homepage -
Getting a Private Registration will:
Stop domain-related spam
Prevent harassers & stalkers
End data mining
Protect your family's privacy
And more! [Interesting!]
Later, at the bottom of the
homepage they state -
If you are in law enforcement,
For our
subpoena policies,
You can click the links above or
just try to guess what comes next and actually it is worse than you would
imagine.
They say that they will help law-enforcement officers all they can and, if
they have a valid civil subpoena (court order), they will respond - but
their fees are $75.00 per hours and $0.25 per document page provided.
Actually attending upon law enforcement officers (with or without subpoenas)
is probably the least profitable service offered by domainsbyproxy.com
because there is hardly any point in bothering.
Anyone who took the trouble to hide their website registration in this way
would have certainly covered the rest of their tracks and won't be found.
So they are all set up with a
domain name and all they need is a website with a few villas and photos they
have copied from elsewhere and they are all ready to start taking money - as
simple as that!
Best of all, they don't have to worry about the little quirks and
inconveniences that even the very best villas have as it is simply a
question of inventing the whole portfolio and using the most attractive
photos they can find.
Double bookings are not a problem as they can book each week as many times
as they like and of course at the most attractive prices.
The "Morairway Scam" is not
even just confined to Britain. Press reports indicate that holidaymakers
have been ripped off in most European countries. And it is not even a case
of a company having a liquidity problem but a premeditated fraud.
None of the villas actually exist or ever did and morairaway.com was not
registered until September 2008.
Many of the holidaymakers who lost there money have already contacted the
police in their home country or Spain but nothing can be done now.
It seems that Morairaway (and all who sailed in her) have vanished without
trace.
Moraira-Info Article:
How to avoid holiday rental
fraud.
05 July 2009 İMike King 2009
Author's Bio: Mike King has lived
and worked in Moraira sin 1971. Since 1990 he has run Villa Holiday Services
- a Moraira Rental Agency with the reference: EE-0011-A
Villa Holiday Services is registered as a rental agency with the Delegation
for Tourism of the Sate of Valencia. Mike is a member of the Alicante
Association of Professional Rental Agencies (AEA).
The VHS website is
VillaServers
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