HOLIDAYMAKERS BEWARE

HOLIDAYMAKERS planning their next adventure have been urged to be wary of faceless fraudsters when booking trips on the internet by a Bahrain expat family – victims of an intricate web scam.

The Niblett family – Jed and Veronica and their children Sam, nine, and Josh, six – almost had their African safari dream shattered when they arrived at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi last month.

Veronica, 39, a former travel agent and more experienced than most people when it comes to organising holidays abroad, was stunned when she found out that the $2,000 deposit she had paid through a bank transfer had been paid into a hoax account.

The emails of the tour company, Kenya Expresso Tours and Safaris – which has received a certificate of excellence from holiday web specialist Tripadvisor – had been hacked into and an imposter had posed as the company’s travel and safari specialist, Paul Mwendwa, who they had earlier made contact with.

Veronica said: “We arrived early in the afternoon. Luckily I had printed out all the documentation and emails we had exchanged and we were expecting the hotel we were staying at to come and pick us up.

“We called Paul after waiting around for 20 minutes and he was completely flummoxed. He didn’t know what had happened. But, he came with a driver and was able to sort out the entire stay. He was wonderful and we were lucky that we had arrived during the low season.

“But it was an expensive experience and we hope others reading about our plight will not make the same mistake.”

When the family landed in Nairobi, the tour company had no idea they would be arriving because no legitimate booking had been made.
 
Veronica explained: “We had made a couple of phone calls to Paul before making any bookings from Bahrain. He was fabulous and they had a 24/7 number and as a company were quite accessible.

“A Kenyan safari is booked as a package. All you pay for when you arrive is your drinks, tips and mementoes. Everything else – stay, food, driver and transport and entry into the game parks is included in the deal.

“I went and booked our Gulf Air flights first. The next step was to transfer the deposit for the holiday to a bank account, which Paul had sent me details of on his original email.

“Four hours later, I got another email saying that as auditing was being carried out the company account was closed and the deposit should be transferred to the financial director of the company. Although alarm bells rang I thought as it was Africa they might have their little quirks.”

The couple emailed the company for clarification but made the fatal mistake of not making another telephone call to Paul. Only after investigations did they notice that there was a slight change in the email responder’s address. It cleverly included an extra ‘i’.
 
Veronica added: “I continued to have email correspondence with the person whom I thought was Paul. As a result of the whole history of past legitimate emails being included in our emails I didn’t notice anything amiss. I have got a big MAC and it is not a small computer screen but I did not pick up on it.

“I love documentation and I was asking about vouchers and things and they were replying all along. It was not that they took the money and cut us off. They were stringing us along and wanted the scam to go on for as long as possible. They even suggested that we pay the rest of the amount because of good exchange rates, which we thankfully declined.”

As well as being out of pocket the rip-off dug deep into their spending money. The family had to withdraw additional dollars to cover costs in a region in which only $400 could be withdrawn from any ATM on any given day.

Their nightmare experience was immediately relayed to the Kenyan authorities.

Jed, 45, a banker, said: “Although it was bad for us, we have stopped a dozen others from turning up in Kenya at the height of the holiday season and finding their trip ruined. After investigations it appeared that we were the first victims of the scam – fortunately for Paul and unfortunately for us!”

Kenyan police were quickly able to freeze the scam merchants bank accounts because the couple had print outs of all the correspondence. They discovered the fraudsters had hacked their Gmail accounts too and deleted all electronic evidence.

Veronica explained: “There was nothing in my ‘Sent box’ ... everything had gone. They had hacked into my account and deleted everything to do with the safari. I was able to recover all the IP addresses sitting on my MAC and send the details to the authorities.

“All I can think is that we were incredibly lucky that we arrived during the low season and we had a great guy in Paul to help us through.”

The family visited Samburu National Park, stayed at the Ark Hotel in Aberdare National Park, Lake Nakuru, where they took a boat ride with the hippos and fed a fish eagle. The last stop was at the Masai Mara National Park, where they stayed in permanent tents. The original cost of their tour package was $4,400.