AI driven travel scams surge 900%

Booking.com is warning of a surge in travel scams.

Transcript

00:00I'm Conway Gibbs reporting from the New York Stock Exchange. Here's what we're watching on the street

00:03today. A pullback in NVIDIA after becoming the world's most valuable publicly traded company

00:09spread to the NASDAQ and the S&P 500. The Dow, however, finished higher. Investors digested the

00:15worst slump in new home construction projects in four years. Higher for long interest rates

00:21are hurting the industry. In other news, artificial intelligence is responsible

00:26for a 900% increase in travel scams over the past 18 months, according to a booking.com executive.

00:35Marnie Wilking, the head of IT security for the online travel company behind Priceline,

00:39Kayak and OpenTable, told a tech conference, quote, attackers are definitely using AI to

00:45launch attacks that mimic emails far better than anything that they've done to date.

00:51So-called phishing attacks are most popular with scammers. That's when the perpetrator

00:56sends out a realistic looking email in order to get a would-be victim to fork over credit card data.

01:02Travel sites like booking.com and Airbnb are particularly vulnerable, according to the BBC,

01:08because those sites list personal properties whose owners can be harder to verify.

01:13Victims think they are booking a room, only to find out when it's too late that they don't have

01:17a place to stay, they're out of the money they paid and the scammer has disappeared into thin

01:23air. But AI isn't all bad. Booking.com says it is using AI to help weed out fake postings.

01:32That'll do it for your daily briefing from the New York Stock Exchange.

01:34I'm Conway Gittens with The Street.