
Amoma.com is a scam (2017) - ValentineC
https://medium.com/@edubcb/learn-from-me-amoma-com-is-a-scam-805ee2cbe868
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RHSeeger
The thing I find the most interesting is

> On July 20th, I got a call from my boss. I needed to be in San Francisco on
> July 23rd.

> I had a hotel budget of $280 a night

> here is what I saw on my company’s internal travel site (bookings for double
> the budget)

At this point, I would reach out to my boss and ask "Do I book it at twice the
budget?". If my boss says yes, the company covers it. If my boss says no, then
I don't go. It's as simple as that.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_If my boss says no, then I don 't go._

That's the right decision, is he supposed to cover the difference out of
pocket?

And it gets worse. This also happened: _I adjusted the filters and looked
everywhere. After about 3 hours searching I couldn’t find a hotel for under
$280 anywhere in the city._

Now there's a productive use of employee time! How much did that cost the
company?

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gnicholas
Interesting story, but what are we supposed to "learn" from it? Obviously we
won't use this company for bookings, but what's the bigger takeaway?

Partners of kayak may be scammers? That's news to me, so that's useful to
know.

American Express had good customer service? The fact that the author had to
follow up to get a full refund indicates that it wasn't the most streamlined
process ever.

Is there another lesson here?

~~~
joexner
I got a similar sinking feeling just a few days ago right after booking a
flight through Kayak. It was a too-good-to-be-true rate on a flight from
Boston to Barcelona with a company called Vayama. Vayama runs lots of little
scams, like selling airline tickets before actually buying them from the
airline, and cancelling the order if the flight fills up or they can't
purchase them profitably. A quick web search shows hundreds (thousands?) of
complaints against Vayama, but Kayak keeps pimping them.

Some people seem to say that using Vayama worked out for them, but with my
trip 3 weeks away still I'm pretty on edge.

We're supposed to learn that Kayak is pants now, and they should feel bad.

~~~
BubRoss
You need a flight booking number to know if you actually have a ticket booked.
If you've that, you're fine, if not, you have more planning to do.

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usr1106
I don't think they are a scam. I have used them twice at least in Belgium and
Germany when their offer was cheaper than the competition. The worst thing
that happened was that the room was sold as tax included, but of course the
Brussels room tax had to be paid to the hotel on the spot in addition. While
this is fraud in the strict sense, it happens in Brussels all the time on all
sites. I have no idea how their business model works and I am not to defend
them. But I guess the author was just the victim of a "normal" mess-up with
more rooms given to various booking systems in total than available in
reality. And of course poor customer service which is standard for most
companies doing business on the internet.

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leereeves
The author "confirmed" its a scam because the hotel didn't have any open
rooms, but many travel sites have a separate inventory of rooms they pay for
(booked or not) and resell. Those rooms wouldn't be open for direct booking.

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walrus01
There's a company _right now_ running facebook ads for a suspiciously low
priced DSLR camera gimbal ($49 for a product that should cost $1200) which
nobody is having any success getting FB to take down. It goes to a credit card
processing page. I want to know what the end goal is of outright scams like
this. Doesn't the payment processing arrangement get yanked pretty quick once
the percentage of chargebacks rises above a few percent of the total number of
transactions?

[https://imgur.com/a/F0Uea8a](https://imgur.com/a/F0Uea8a)

~~~
luckylion
> I want to know what the end goal is of outright scams like this.

collect credit card information?

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dorkwood
He says after receiving the email he knew it had to be a scam. How did he
know? It didn’t look official enough? I think I’m missing something.

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zwerdlds
As a total 100% complete side note, if you're in need of a cheap room in SF,
take a look at the San Remo. It's always been the cheapest for me and it's got
tons of character. Make sure you're comfortable with the room size and shared
bathrooms though.

