Ticket fraud is a real phenomenon.
Magine organizing a romantic excursion for supper with your husband on your 20th anniversary. You visit one of the top tourist attractions in the nation, treat yourself to the greatest lodging, and take in the most captivating events and sights. You want to visit the most exclusive restaurant in town to cap off the anniversary night. Unfortunately, you find out that they’re completely booked for the night in question. However, you’re sly — a fast search on Craigslist finds someone who is offering to sell their reservation for the evening. irksome, but worth the cost if you want the evening to go flawless. Your plans have been rescheduled.
However, there are three other people who show up at the restaurant claiming to have the same reservation as you. This is because the vendor deceived you all by creating a single internet reservation and selling it several times, leaving four couples bewildered and angry (as well as broke).
If you think that’s bad enough, try to picture yourself as the restaurant these four groups arrived at. It’s much worse: there isn’t enough space to have every party on a whole floor, and roughly 75% of them will be quite irate.
You will, at the very least, have to deal with some inconvenience, awkward small talk, and some disgruntled customers who are unlikely to come again. Even worse, even though your restaurant did nothing wrong, negative publicity or word-of-mouth could harm your brand. Even though the bogus name used by the fraudster on the system matched the reservation, one party contacted to clarify that everything was as it seemed to the host.
Why has there been an increase in restaurant fraud?
Because getting a seat at a restaurant in some cities can seem like winning the lottery, there are a growing number of scams that try to take advantage of that desire. Scammers use online booking platforms to take advantage of any available reservations and resell them for a profit. Foodies also bribe maître d’s and stalk reservation sites.
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What steps can restaurants take then to stop this and safeguard their customers? These dishonest people have been given cover by the growing trend of selling popular restaurant reservations online; it is the responsibility of restaurants to make sure that their reservation systems have adequate authentication procedures in place to stop users from abusing the system.
There are many partners for reservation platforms; however, not all of them are designed to stop this kind of fraud, even though they all provide incredibly handy services for both employees and customers. Restaurants should request a tour of the platform’s security and authentication capabilities when choosing a partner (or negotiating a contract renewal with an existing one).
Some reservation platforms have begun integrating intelligent identification data tools into their systems, making it possible to detect attempts to make reservations under false pretenses and either flag or completely reject them. Additionally, data can foil those who are acting in places they are not. Geolocation features embedded in the identity networks plugged into the more secure reservation platforms can flag this activity and send it for manual review; even though the average system might not notice if someone makes a reservation from Texas for restaurants in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York on the same evening.
In order to ensure that a fraudster attempting to hide their tracks has one more obstacle in their path, new accounts created immediately before making these highly sought-after bookings are likewise subject to increased scrutiny. Restaurants whose reservation partners employ these identity data networks for authentication are able to detect fraudulent conduct before it happens because of continuous authentication and customized risk signals that look for indicators of suspicious activity.
Businesses should rely on their reservation partners and advocate for more sophisticated security and authentication features if they want to shield their clients from falling for a reservation scam that is being conducted in their name. Nobody should have their special night ruined, and no upscale establishment should have its reputation damaged by a lone person trying to earn quick money from their computer.