Hello and welcome to the last travel podcast of the week with me, Simon Calder.

And today, you're my very special friend and I can offer you a fabulous deal.

Well, if it sounds too good to be true, very often in travel, it is.

Of course, any travel purchase is an act of faith. You put some money down

and then you very much hope it's going to result in you having a lovely holiday. Well,

almost all the time it does. There's very tight regulations in travel. But unfortunately, as household incomes shrink

and the cost of proper travel increases, people are increasingly likely to be defrauded. And that's

the subject of today's sermon. So, normally the fraud is like this. Somebody purporting to be a

legitimate travel company will say, oh, I've got a fantastic deal for you. And they might do that,

for example, by setting up fraudulent websites, paying for

search terms and so on, and you find them. And they've got, my goodness, amazingly cheap deals

on flights. Here we have, somebody who got in touch with me, holiday to Singapore and Philippines

in September this year, two people, premium economy,

on Singapore Airlines, £2,200. That is absolutely amazing. And the person who contacted me,

with whom I've expressed great sympathy, but said there's exactly nothing I can do,

said that he thought this travel agent was a friend. The agent even said that he put

£100 of his own money into getting those really cheap tickets. I thought that was very kind

of him, said my contact.

All too predictably, of course, the tickets didn't arrive.

Singapore Airlines had no records of booking in those names.

My friend did contact his bank, who actually managed to get about half the money back. The rest was transferred

to an offshore account, difficult to retrieve. And then, only then, he thought, I'm going to check

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