A woman was left flustered when as many as 100 people flocked to her house in a span of a month claiming that they booked the house for holidays.
It all started when Gillian, a resident of North London, opened the doors to her house on July 4 to find a “poor, tired woman, and her daughter” who came from Hong Kong. They claimed that they booked the house and she was forced to tell them that her house was never up for such a deal.
Gillian, in an interview with BBC Radio 4, told how a few hours later, three or four people visited her house claiming the same. The tourists claimed that they had booked the house from Booking.com. “They came from all over the world: Australians who had just arrived, there were people from Saudi Arabia, some people from the north of England, and I just could not believe it,” she said.
This continued for the entire month of July with some paying as much as £1000, or roughly Rs 9.6 lakhs, to stay in the house they booked on the website. With as many as 100 people knocking at her door, Gillian decided to find the crux of the matter herself.
She went on the website and found that an ad was listed with her address on it but the pictures used for the house were fake. “It was obviously a scam and someone had used my address,” Gillian said. She added, “I felt so sorry for those tourists knocking on my door – all I could do was send them away.”
As the scam came to light, Booking.com removed the listing and got in touch with everybody…
