The hotel phone call scam is back in business. A friend of mine just told me how her son received a phone call in the middle of the night while he was staying at a hotel. Sometime in the middle of the night, the phone in her son’s hotel room rang and he was told that there had been a “glitch” in the computer system. The caller was apologetic, but explained how all of the credit card numbers had been lost and the hotel needed to reconstruct the billing information.
Being somewhat groggy—he’d just been woken from a sound sleep—her son gave the caller an address, but balked when they asked for his credit card number. He told the caller he’d go down to the front desk to give them the card, at which point the caller hung up.
This particular scam has been around for years. It usually travels around from state-to-state so the scammers avoid getting caught. In my book, it gets an F rating for courtesy—who wants to be woken in the middle of the night? It’s tough enough to get a good night’s sleep in a hotel without having some scammer pulling this stunt.
There’s not much you can do about it except to report the call to the front desk. Most likely, they’ll tell you there’s not much they can do about it either, but that other guests are receiving similar calls. The hotel phone call scam is currently making the rounds, so if you’re traveling and a very courteous person asks you for your credit card number in the middle of the night, you’ve got my permission to be not so nice in return.
