Have you seen or heard of these scams currently doing the rounds in your Hotel? 

Fake petty cash dockets are easy money for those with access to the petty cash tin. Dockets that smooth things out for a guest problem tend to be the easiest to get through. If you have suspicions then ask the guest if something was bought for them.

It won’t surprise you that it will be hard to track that “overseas guest who had a ruined shirt bought for them”, but then your thief knows exactly that and it can cover their tracks nicely. Most of that sort of stuff is only junior league. Scammers have become very clever as is evident by the following that has occurred in recent times. 

This scam begins when Sales and Marketing are contacted by an individual as an agent for a large company, foreign government department ect. The arrangement is made to reserve a meeting room and accommodation for a dozen or so guests to say at the hotel. The reservation is always made for a future date. After a couple of weeks goes by the individual will make contact with the hotel and request that his company executives or dignitaries would like to take a tour or play golf.

The hotel is asked to make the required arrangements and add the cost to the existing contract. Once the arrangements are completed and the contract is done our scammer asks the hotel to send a letter documenting the arrangements with an attached invoice with banking details. 

When our scammer receives letter and invoice they will call and ask for the banking information so they can wire transfer to the hotels account to pay the invoice. On receiving that information the scammer now has the hotels letterhead, Managers signature, banking details he can create a document on his home computer that requests the bank to wire money from the hotels account to some other account – likely offshore but not always.

This scam works a treat. Maybe your hotel has tighter security than that but it has been said and proven many don’t. 

Double check your systems. Make sure you are not vulnerable to a simple rip-off technique that could be sucking dollars from your bottom line. 

Greg