The EU has opened formal Digital Services Act proceedings against Booking.com over phishing and fake offers, Golem reports.
The DSA is Brussels' rulebook for online platforms: duties to act on reports of illegal content, obligations to assess and mitigate systemic risks, and the ability to fine a platform a meaningful share of global turnover. Fraud that reaches travelers through a marketplace's own pages — fake offers, phishing wrapped in booking confirmations — sits squarely in the risk categories the law was written for, even when the bad actors are third parties rather than the platform itself.
Opening proceedings is the start of an examination, not a verdict. The regulator will now look at how Booking.com detects fraudulent listings, verifies the parties behind them, and responds when users report being phished.
For marketplaces, the case underlines where DSA enforcement is heading. Travel is a worst-case mix for fraud: high-value transactions, urgency-driven purchases, and listings that are cheap to create and cheaper to imitate. Platform-responsibility debates increasingly turn on how fast a platform acts, not only whether it acts at all — and this proceeding puts that question in formal, legally binding territory.
