Not sure if the text has changed since August, but did it look like this:Bree wrote:I have had a few enquiries in the last few days from HA/OD all asking me to reply directly to an outlook address, they all have left spaces between the name @ & outlook so that the email address comes through, I have reported them to HA.
I received the above enquiry via HA from a Helen Abney for a stay in November this afternoon. I checked my dashboard to see if it showed, checked that the dates were actually available, checked the English grammar and just thought that maybe they forgot to put in our names in the salutation.Dear,
I am interested in renting your property. Please contact me for details and deposit info.
To keep things simple (for me) from a correspondence point of view, I will be emailing you more fully from my 'home' address helenabney @ outlook.com
Emailing through Homeaway means I cannot easily keep all my correspondence in one place: where I want and need it.
Many thanks and kind regards,
Helen
Asking to communicate with them outside of the HA system was also no problem for us, because we always do this anyway after a first email through the system to satisfy HA's performance count.
One thing I did think strange is that there was no phone number showing (no means to let it be shown either) when viewing the enquiry in the dashboard. But I was definitely on the real HA site because I had actually typed that into my browser, so thought that HA had again been tinkering with things.
So, after doing our usual security checks, I replied directly to the email address (helenabney@outlook.com)
Then two hours later I received an enquiry via OD with the exact same text but with a date request for next April. Then the alarm bells started ringing.
Pasting some of the text of the enquiry into Google brought up this from a French HA Community thread:
https://community.homeaway.com/thread/51823
There was the same text but with a French name underneath.
So, this is not phishing with a fake site and no reply (yet) that they want to pay with a 'certified bank cheque'. Are they going to all this trouble just to harvest email addresses? Is this something new? This has now got me worried....