EU Opens Investigation Into Booking.com Over Fake Listings and Phishing Scams

The European Commission has opened an investigation under the Digital Services Act into whether Booking.com is doing enough to stop scams on its platform. The probe covers three areas: fraudulent or non-compliant listings, phishing and smishing (SMS phishing) and social engineering, and how clearly ads and boosted listings are separated from organic results. The Commission also suspects the platform is not sufficiently protecting the data of consumers and business users.

Officials described how the scams work. Fake listings can be posted by people pretending to own a property. In other cases, scammers take over a genuine property owner's account and contact details, then message guests saying they must pay additional amounts. Officials pointed to Booking.com's own June 2024 admission of a 500 to 900 percent jump in travel scams over the previous 18 months. In the Netherlands alone, more than 1,000 fraud notifications were made in the first part of 2026, causing damage of €82,000, a tenfold increase on the previous year.

The Commission acknowledges that Booking.com assesses fraud and takes internal measures, but an official said they are "absolutely substandard" and that the company could build much more solid systems to prevent fraud. This article covers only the opening of the source report, so further details of the investigation are not included here.