Joe Duggan (Reporter)
A SCANDALOUS holiday rental website first reported in the Olive Press two months ago has finally been taken down from the internet.
Rent Holidays Villas, which is believed to have scammed hundreds of British tourists, has finally been removed from the web, following repeated requests from this paper to hosts GoDaddy.
But despite this success, the fraudsters have been quick to set up another fraudulent site to snare fresh victims, as one Soller homeowner has revealed.
The villa owner, who asked to remain anonymous, contacted us to tell us of her ‘shock’ to see her villa illegally advertised on new site mallorca-rentals.net.
She only found out when a potential client contacted her about a rental in September when she was already full.
“The client had seen it on this dodgy site and wanted to double check luckily for her,” she said.
“It is shocking that people put so much effort into scamming people.”
Last year, a British family who rented her home had previously been scammed out of ‘a lot of money’ from fraudsters.
A number given for mallorca-rentals.net was ‘not available due to restrictions’.
Another scam website, Balearic Villa Escapes, is still live on the internet.
I did a quick look at the info related to the site and here’s some more details for you:
1. The site is hosted with site5 and manages email with Gmail
2. It’s on a shared hosting plan
3. The Google Analytics ID is: UA-101758878-1 and appears to be unique (not used on another site)
4. The username behind the site is rental333, it’s valid
5. The user didn’t remove the “demo” content of the WordPress template and uses the Houzez 7 theme of Favethemes
6. Most if not all the pics he uses are imported from Tripadvisor, probably at API level which also pulled all the info about the properties.
7. They started to build the site around 21/06 – 22/06 and copied info from a couple of existing sites about Mallorca
So imho it shouldn’t be that hard for authorities to start digging up info if they wanted to do something about it.