Someone listed 10 Downing Street on Booking.com. In 20 minutes, 14 people tried to book it
A consumer group put the UK prime minister's front door up as a one-bedroom flat. The site's fraud checks didn't blink for two months.
Which?, the UK consumer group, uploaded a listing to Booking.com on 18 June advertising a "1 bedroom apartment in the heart of London". The address was 10 Downing Street. The photos were of that famous black door. The description called it "a prime city centre location", a short 400-metre walk from Big Ben.
Then came the part that should worry anyone who books a place to stay online. Which? opened the listing to the public for exactly 20 minutes. In that window, 14 people asked to book it. The listing itself stayed on the platform until 27 August — more than two months after it went up.
The scary bit isn't the fake flat. It's what happened inside the chat. Which? researchers sent a message through Booking.com's own messaging system asking the guest to click an external link to "confirm payment details". That is the exact move scammers use, and booking sites normally block it. Which? says Booking.com neither flagged nor removed the link.
So the danger isn't that you'll turn up at Downing Street with a suitcase. It's that a message arriving inside a trusted app feels safe — and that feeling is the whole scam. You paid attention to the brand, not to the link.
A fake review also went live, praising "hanging out" with Larry the cat. If the filters can't spot that, they can't spot much.
Booking.com's answer matters too, and it's worth reading closely. The company called this a "limited test" that is "not a true reflection of the experience of millions of listings or reviews published on our platform", and said the listing was never "live" across those two months, so "some of our automatic fraud controls were not triggered to completely remove the closed listing". It says AI and other checks "help us detect and remove the majority of fraudulent listings within 24 hours". Both things can be true: most fakes go fast, and the one that gets through reaches you personally.
Anyone who books a room on their phone at 1am because it was £40 cheaper — students on a first trip abroad, people moving cities for a job and hunting a cheap week's stay, families booking the summer holiday months ahead. Which? Travel editor Rory Boland put the stake plainly: holidaymakers "risk losing thousands of pounds to bogus listings and phishing links". For a lot of readers that's not a bad quarter — that's the whole trip, the deposit and the savings behind it.
Which? wants booking sites forced to pull false listings quickly under the Online Safety Act, and says Ofcom, which enforces it, should use the Act to "crack down on irresponsible online platforms". Ofcom told Which? that platforms already have legal duties to take down illegal user content "swiftly once they become aware of it". What nobody has said is what "swiftly" means in days, or whether Ofcom will act on this case at all. No deadline, no hearing, no review was announced. That's the honest state of it.
Fourteen people in 20 minutes. Not over a weekend — 20 minutes, on a listing nobody was advertising, for an address that is on the news most nights. Now imagine a listing that looks completely ordinary, in a city you don't know, staying up for two months. The question isn't whether the filters usually work. It's what the exception costs the person who meets it.
Sources: BBC News (Technology), "Fake 10 Downing Street listing exposes 'unfit' Booking.com, says consumer group", by Liv McMahon
Проверка показала, что «умные» фильтры Booking.com не заметили объявление о сдаче резиденции британского премьера — и за 20 минут его успели попросить забронировать 14 человек, а удалили листинг только через два месяца, то есть шансы наткнуться на фальшивую квартиру и фишинговую ссылку внутри чата платформы вполне реальны.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections