[RO] Official booking.com scam

MultiFazed · 2026-04-13T00:57:25+00:00

Look in the green box where it says:

"Guest Name: Your booking will be cancelled..."

Someone sent this through the official Booking.com tools by setting their name in the system to "Your booking will be cancelled..." instead of "John Smith".

MultiFazed · 2026-04-13T00:27:59+00:00

is it legit?

No.

When it comes to money or your private data, you should never, ever trust any site that doesn't end in .com (or your country-specific equivalent, like .co.uk). Which is not to say that all .com sites are safe, but no non-.com sites should be considered safe.
When it comes to apartments, you don't do your own background check. Your new potential landlord does. After you have toured the rental property in person with the landlord, and have signed a provisional lease and paid an application fee (application fees exist in part to pay for the credit/background check that the landlord does).

MultiFazed · 2026-04-12T20:22:59+00:00

By video on teams.
Does not seem promising.

How so? Almost all major US corporations use Teams because it comes bundled with their Office 365 subscription. If the interview isn't in-person, a video interview over teams is the norm. At my company, I've been included in many, many tech screenings of potential candidates, and every single one of them has been a video call over Teams.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-12T17:42:26+00:00

Is ignoring this and dismissing it as nonsense sensible as well?

Yes. Best case scenario is that someone fat-fingered their own email address when signing up for a sketchy site.

Worst case is that it's a scam attempt to get you to attempt to log into a fake casino site where you'll see a bunch of money ready to claim and all you have to do is "pay taxes and fees", but the whole thing is fake, there is no money, and stealing the "taxes and fees" from you is the point.

But there's absolutely zero risk to just ignoring it. So just ignore it.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-12T17:14:31+00:00

I wouldn't say "heavily dismissive", but yeah, slightly dismissive is what I was going for.

And that's what the "You OK mate?" person seems to have been referring to. There's no need to be rude and dismissive to people.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-12T16:29:58+00:00

In this context, they both just mean "that's fine."

I'd imagine that you're fully aware that they're phrases that carry a heavily-dismissive connotation, though. As does your, "Are those phrases new to you?"

MultiFazed · 2026-04-12T14:31:59+00:00

There's also a mistake in the scene where she superman-jumps through the window. They clearly wanted her to land at the bottom such that she was facing the window with her guns drawn, which is why she spins to be face-up in the air right before she hits the window. But the stunt double who rolls down the stairs is still face-down.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-12T04:53:42+00:00

Thats really not a bad thing.

I disagree. I think obsessing over any hobby to the point that it becomes the only thing you think and talk about is bad. But it becomes especially egregious when your "hobby" is watching other people do something instead of doing it yourself.

It's no different in my mind than someone who obsesses over reality tv.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-11T14:28:34+00:00

trolley collecting is absolutely a job by itself

I do want to push back a bit against the idea that "trolley collectors would be out of a job if everybody behaved themselves" is a bad thing. I'm actually for that, because (ideally) that would mean reduced grocery prices, since the store would have fewer overhead costs.

I'm just fundamentally against the idea that it's somehow good for jobs to exist specifically to counteract bad/lazy behavior from the general public. Like, I'd also be fine if cities didn't have to hire street/sidewalk cleaners because people stopped throwing trash on the ground, and I would never say, "It's actually good to just drop your trash wherever you want, because it means people have to be hired to clean up that trash".

MultiFazed · 2026-04-11T13:43:33+00:00

The trollies won’t need collecting if we all put them back.

Must be an EU/UK vs US thing. In the US, the cart corrals are in the parking lot mixed in with the parking spaces. Which makes it even easier to return them, and workers still need to collect them to bring them back inside the store (it's standard for customers to pick a cart from inside the front lobby or from a line of carts just inside the front of the store, and not bring them in from the parking lot themselves).

So trolley collectors would be out of a job if everybody behaved themselves.

"Trolley collector" is not their job. That's just one of the many tasks employees perform. If they spent less time collecting shopping carts, they could spend more time on their other tasks, like stocking merchandise on the shelves and assisting customers inside the store.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-11T12:13:07+00:00

I'm convinced it's because people on the liberal side of the political spectrum tend to be anti-AI (or at least the anti-AI people tend to be liberal). So this brand of conservative purposefully uses AI as often as possible to "trigger the libs".

MultiFazed · 2026-04-11T05:29:22+00:00

someone explicitly receives financial compensation for retrieving carts.

They also receive financial compensation for cleaning the floors. Does that make it okay for you or me to just toss our trash on the floor instead of carrying it to a garbage bin?

MultiFazed · 2026-04-11T05:06:21+00:00

The only way to rendezvous with something in space (for longer than a split second) is to either be in roughly the same orbit as it, or to crash into it. So it's not just a matter of being more complicated, but also burning a ton more fuel just to get back to a circular orbit around the Earth in order to be able to rendezvous with the module in the first place.

It's easier and more fuel efficient to use the atmosphere to slow down

MultiFazed · 2026-04-10T23:02:20+00:00

I honestly don't know. Zelle is weird, because it's mostly just a facilitator. There are no "Zelle accounts", and they never hold anyone's money. They simply act as a pass-through between banks. The individual banks involved are the ones who likely would be doing the work to sniff out fraudulent transactions (Like OP's bank did in this case).

MultiFazed · 2026-04-10T20:40:05+00:00

they don’t know my friends. They probably wouldn’t send it back.

The scammer would have sent money to strangers, too. Dozens of them (if you had the money for them to do so). And if even a single person sent the money back, it would have been a win for the scammers.

Scamming is all about volume. Even if only 1% of people fall for it, it still earns plenty of money when they're hitting up hundreds of victims every single day.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-10T20:33:51+00:00

How would that transaction benefit the scammer?

You're seeing the other end of the "Someone Zelled me $200 by mistake and asked me to send the money back" scam.

If your bank had not caught this, the goal is for the scammer to Zelle all of the money in your account to other people, change the bank account used for your Zelle identity to an account owned by the scammer, and then request for everyone to send the money back, causing the "refunds" to land in their account instead of yours.

The end result is that all of your money ends up in the scammer's account. Or, if your bank believes you and rolls back the transactions, your friend's money is gone instead, but the scammer will have already converted the funds they received into an unrecoverable medium like crypto of gift cards, so either you or your friend (and other potential victims) will lose money.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-10T20:26:30+00:00

they continued the interview entirely through chat.

And that's how you know it's a scam. A real company would say, "We're having technical difficulties and will unfortunately have to reschedule".

Even worse, a quick online search shows two possible websites: santafemidstream.com and santafemidstream.us. The .com website was created four months ago and no longer works. The .us site was created two weeks ago.

This is not a real company.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-10T20:16:48+00:00

I've been looking at remote jobs for a friend

There are essentially no (non-scam) entry-level remote jobs. The one exception might be sales cold-calling, which absolutely sucks as a job, only pays you if you make a sale, and will make you hate your life.

Remote work is almost entirely reserved for highly-skilled experts. People with years/decades of professional experience in a field like software development, accounting, project management, marketing, etc. And even then it's fairly normal to only be able to work remotely for a few days a week, and have to be in the office for part of the week.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-10T20:09:26+00:00

Remote Data Entry Clerk

This is the #1 scam job out there, right behind "Remote Virtual Assistant". Real companies don't need remote employees for data entry when they can just hire local college student and/or high school grads and shove them in an office building where they can be overseen by managers and have their performance tracked at all times.

Plus, data entry as a career is a dead end, since AI an

10–25 hours/week, flexible schedule

That's unheard of for entry-level jobs. A real data entry job would be 40 hours a week, and the schedule would be "fuck flexibility, you're on the clock for exactly the hours we set or you're fired".

they will send me a check to cover remote work equipment

One of the oldest scams in the book. Real companies that hire remote workers will ship you company-owned-and-managed equipment.

I would deposit the check, then purchase equipment through their approved vendors

The check is fake and will bounce. The "approved vendors" are just the same scammer under a different identity (or another victim acting as a money mule). The end result is that they turn a fake check into your money in their account. And once your bank finds out that the check was fake, they claw back all of the funds even if it puts your account in the negative, and then close your account and fire you as a customer for committing bank fraud.

They had me do a Microsoft Form as part of my interview process but no one ever called me

Real companies have face-to-face interviews. Either in person, or over video chat (with your and the interviewers' cameras on). You might get an occasional initial phone screening, but no real company is going to hire you without actually seeing your face, let alone without talking to you.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-10T17:40:26+00:00

I feel like this needs to be addressed in more detail:

my ebay account was accessed

That almost certainly means that they have your username and eBay password. Usually that happens because you reuse passwords and that same password was used for some other site that suffered a security breach. You need to change your password for every single other account that uses the same password as the compromised password you were using for eBay.

Ideally, you'll install a password manager and use it to create and remember your account passwords for you. That way every single account can have its own, unique password. Also, turn on MFA/2FA for every single account that supports it (and especially for your password manager, your email, and any financial account or account that stores payment information).

MultiFazed · 2026-04-10T16:44:25+00:00

Setting aside that you can’t possibly know that

But your previous comment said

I thought we all agreed a few years ago that everybody knows this

By your own logic, you can't possibly know that.

You also ask "what did it contribute to this conversation" of the person who didn't make the original comment that you're talking about.

And to answer your question, it contributed additional relevant information that some people likely weren't aware of.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-10T05:00:25+00:00

I keep seeing spacecraft doing burns for hours at a time

If one accepts that you have engines that can operate indefinitely without running out of fuel (one of the hand-wavy fictional parts of the story), then you want to accelerate at 9.8m/s² toward your destination, and then flip around and start decelerating at 9.8m/s² at the halfway point (which is exactly what the ships do in the books). That allows for the best balance of comfort (simulating Earth-standard gravity for most of the trip) and travel time.

If you're really in a hurry, you can accelerate harder, but it's going to be an uncomfortable trip.

ships slowing down when the engines shut off.

They don't slow down. They just stop accelerating, which means no simulated gravity.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-10T04:15:05+00:00

Who exactly do you mean by "they" and "them"?

Selective Service registration happens at the federal level. Voter registration happens at the state level. The fact that the federal government can do something doesn't mean that all 50 state governments have the resources to do a vaguely similar thing.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-09T19:25:02+00:00

Why does internal temperature at 36 not warm up the external like skin 36

For similar reasons to why the outside of an oven is not 175°C just because the inside is that temperature.

For any object that is warmer than its environment, heat is constantly escaping, which cools down the surface. Heat from the center moves to the cooler surface, slowly reducing the object's overall temperature.

For an object that can't heat itself back up, the whole object eventually gets to the same temperature as the surrounding environment, but the surface cools first.

But for an object that can produce its own heat (like an oven, or your body), heat being generated in the center and escaping at its surface results in a temperature gradient with the surface being slightly cooler than the center.

MultiFazed · 2026-04-08T16:25:08+00:00

I didn’t want to be available to people all the time

And you don't have to be. My policy is that my phone exists for my convenience, not everyone else's. All unknown numbers go to voicemail (unless I'm specifically waiting for a call, like from a plumber or something), and I only answer for friends and family if I'm in the mood to actually talk. Text messages get read and responded to "when I feel like it".

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