Mumbai: Online travel is one of the sweet spots of the Internet business here, as it is in most parts of the world, and this makes the space vulnerable to fraud.
While details on the extent of these frauds isn’t known, a recent report by MarkMonitor, a San Francisco-based firm that works in the area of brand protection, thought instances of brandjacking—the act of hijacking brands through cybersquatting, phishing, false brand associations, pay per click scams or domain kiting—in the online travel space significant enough to separately study it in the Spring 2008 MarkMonitor Brandjacking Index, a quarterly report put out by the firm.
The online travel business in India has increased manifold in the recent past
Brandjacking is also gaining mileage in India. Amitabh Pandey, president and head of e-business with Thomas Cook (India) Ltd, one of the leading travel services companies with an online travel portal, and the man behind Indian Railways’ online ticketing initiative (he used to work for Indian Railways) said India’s online space is increasingly becoming unsafe as in other countries. “Online frauds are there ever since the Internet started and credit cards were introduced. Obviously, the travel space is getting more affected by frauds as online ticketing outpaces other transactions,” Pandey said.
Many of the instances of online fraud concerning travel sites have to do with stolen credit cards. In recent months, there have been reports of stolen credit cards being used to book online tickets of Kingfisher Airlines, Jet Airways and Simply Deccan.
Neelu Singh, chief operating officer of Ezeego1.com, an online travel portal promoted by Cox and Kings Ltd, said the size of the online travel market is about $2 billion and expected to grow to $6 billion by 2010. Prospects for business and scams are hence huge, especially since India raced past other countries in Internet usage (33%) last year, and with the Internet population in the country expected to cross 100 million by the end of 2008.
Still, brandjacking of travel sites here remains unsophisticated—for now.
Ashwin Damera, founder and chief executive officer of Mumbai-based travel portal Travelguru.com, said phishing is common in sectors such as banks, but not among travel sites here. “Apart from phishing, one of the other common frauds is skimming, which is the theft of credit card information used in an otherwise legitimate transaction. Common scenarios for skimming are restaurants or bars where the skimmer has possession of the victim’s credit card out of their immediate view. The skimmer will typically use a small keypad to unobstrusively transcribe the three or four digit card security code which is not present on the magnetic strip,” Damera added.