Leading up to Labor Day weekend last year, San Francisco resident Shipra Shukla booked a hotel reservation online for a trip to Wyoming and fell for a widespread travel scam that allegedly deceives people into overpaying for a room.
Shukla knew the name of the hotel where she wanted to stay and did what many people would do next. She typed the name into Google and clicked one of the top results. “I thought it was the website for the hotel. It looked really pretty, and it had a phone number on it,” she told SFGATE. “The way I function is that I’ll always call the phone number first.”
After speaking with a person who allegedly claimed they represented the Snow King Resort in Jackson, Shukla reserved a room. However, she was unaware that she was actually speaking with someone from a third party called Guest Reservations and that she had just paid more for the room than if she had just gone to the hotel’s actual website. “When I called, I thought I was talking to the hotel,” Shukla said. “I feel like that was deception.”…