Celebrity chefs face trouble with booking scammers

ISTANBUL

One of the new methods of fraud that has emerged in recent times is to copy the websites of well-known restaurants and to ask the customers to pay a deposit for a fake reservation.

Scammers use artificial intelligence systems to copy the websites of famous restaurants and share all the information about the restaurant on these websites as if they were real.

Then, citizens who want to make a reservation to come to the restaurant think that these fake restaurant sites are real and contact the scammers via the phone number specified on the site.

Citizens who pay these fraudsters under the name of reservation realize that they have been scammed when they come to the restaurant.

Turkish famous chef Arda Türkmen was also targeted by these scammers. The scammers almost exactly replicated the website of Türkmen's restaurant and defrauded the customers who made reservations to come to the restaurant by taking money under the pretense of a deposit.

The truth was revealed when the customers came to the chef's restaurant upon their fake reservations and said, "We had a reservation, we gave a deposit." Türkmen made a statement on his social media account and warned his customers to be careful against scammers.

The scammer, who saw Türkmen's posts, reached the chef on social media and said, "Give me 1,000 euros, let me get off your back."

Türkmen emphasized that citizens should be careful against these scammers before making New Year's Eve reservations.

"There will be a lot of closed group bookings this Christmas period. So I would ask everyone to make sure that when they search for a contact number for a restaurant in search engines, they click on the right place and the right link. Because generally the one at the top is clicked on out of habit. It's not always the right address," he said.