Travel scams are getting smarter. Here’s how to protect yourself

Pickpockets were once the biggest worry for travelers heading to new destinations on vacation. But travel scams have become more sophisticated, and scammers using new artificial intelligence tools have become better at creating fake websites and using stolen data to their advantage, said Florent Silve, an executive at Engine, a corporate travel management platform. “What used to look like a fake website now becomes much harder to spot by consumers,” Silve said. According to a Federal Trade Commission report published in June, Americans last year reported losing $3.5 billion to scams in which impostors contacted them through text, email, phone, social media and search engines, though those weren’t all travel scams. Nearly 1 in 3 fraud reports were about impostor scams, making it the most reported fraud category. Travel scams can happen before you even hop on a plane, with scammers posing as your hotel or airline to take advantage of the fact that you’re expecting to receive communications from those companies. “In the past, people were like, ‘Oh if I receive a scam that is completely out of place, that’s how I know it’s a scam.’ But now, the most dangerous scams don’t look suspicio…