Allegations of sloppy security and lax background checks have pointed up the vulnerability to fraud of holidaymakers using online villa-rental sites.

Northumberland couple David and Pat Thomson used Holiday-rentals.co.uk to search for a villa in Mallorca. After finding a property they liked on the website, the Thomsons received an e-mail from an individual claiming to be its owner. After negotiating a fee of £2,800, the owner asked the Thomsons to transfer £700 into a UK bank account as a deposit. “The fact that the owner didn’t have a merchant account with Visa or MasterCard made us feel more secure that this was a private individual advertising a genuine villa on a bona fide website,” Mr Thomson said.

Then, last week, came the bombshell. “We got a call from Holiday-rentals.co.uk telling us to cease communications with this individual because she was running a scam,” Mr Thomson said. “They told us she had intended to collect the full amount before advising us that the villa was not available.”

Mr Thomson says that staff at Holiday-rentals.co.uk, which charges villa owners to advertise on the site, admitted that checks on advertisers usually amounted to no more than “looking in magazines to see if properties were advertised elsewhere”, but Sarah Chambers, from the company’s press office, denied this. “We have a team of more than 100 worldwide to screen listings and prevent fraudulent activity. We dedicate significant resources to adapting these systems as internet scams evolve,” she said.

Holiday-rentals.co.uk admits that the current fraud came to light only after an undisclosed number of clients who had booked other properties advertised by the same individual reported being ripped off. The Mallorca property has now been removed from the website and, while the company admitted it was “impossible to say” if other villas were being advertised fraudulently, it insisted that out of “hundreds of thousands of travellers, we are only aware of a handful of cases where customers have been impacted”.

It added that the Thomsons and other aggrieved parties could have protected themselves using a free “rent with confidence” warranty that offers refunds of up to £2,500 for losses incurred on bookings on the site, but could not explain why this remained an opt-in choice rather than a blanket guarantee.

Kent Constabulary confirmed that it is “at a delicate stage” in the investigation of serious fraud involving overseas villa rental.

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