If you operate a hotel, resort, or vacation rental brand along the Grand Strand, there’s a good chance this scam is already in your guests’ phones.
Here’s how it works. A guest with an upcoming reservation gets a WhatsApp message that looks like it came from your property. It greets them by name. It knows their exact arrival and departure dates. It quotes a booking number. Then it tells them their reservation will be cancelled within 24 hours unless they “verify” their payment card through a link. The link leads to a payment page dressed up in your property’s name — and everything a guest types into it goes straight to a fraud operation, often overseas.
This isn’t a rumor and it isn’t isolated. It’s a wave that has been moving through the hospitality industry since late 2025, it reached Myrtle Beach properties this month, and if you got a precautionary letter from one of your booking-technology vendors this week, this is what that letter was about.
The scam works because it’s built on real reservation data. Guests are trained to ignore clumsy phishing — but a message that knows their name, their dates, and a booking number doesn’t feel like phishing. It feels like the front desk. That’s what makes this one dangerous, and it’s why the response has to come from you, publicly and fast.
What your guests need to hear from you — today
Every property is different, and you should confirm the wording of any guest notice with your own counsel. But the message guests need is simple, and it needs to be everywhere a worried guest might look:
- We will never contact you through WhatsApp to verify a reservation, request payment details, or place a hold on your card through a link. (If your property does legitimately text guests, say precisely what you will and won’t ever ask for.)
- If you receive a message like this, don’t click and don’t reply. Call the phone number published on our official website, and we’ll confirm your real reservation directly.
- If you already clicked and entered card details, call the number on the back of your card now — your reservation with us is safe either way.
And behind the scenes, your team needs four things in place: a visible alert on your website, the same warning on your social channels, a phone script so the front desk gives every caller the same calm answer, and a habit of collecting screenshots from guests who report the messages — those screenshots are what gets the scam sites taken down and what your booking vendors’ investigators need.
What this looks like when it’s done right
We’re a full-service marketing and web development company in Brunswick County, and we manage the digital presence for multiple hospitality brands along the Grand Strand. When one of them brought this scam to us — on a Friday, with guests already receiving the messages — here’s what the response looked like:
- Within the hour, a fraud alert was live on every page of the property’s website, with a dedicated notice page and the property’s real phone number front and center.
- The same afternoon, the scam link was reported to the major browser-safety services, so Chrome, Safari, and Firefox begin warning anyone who clicks it, and a takedown report was filed with the scam site’s infrastructure provider.
- Before the evening shift, the front desk had a one-page script: what to say, how to reassure, what to do for a guest who already entered their card, and what to collect for the investigation.
- The same day, the warning was published to the property’s social channels, and a documented evidence packet — sender numbers, timing, screenshots — was in the hands of the booking vendor’s forensic investigators.
No committee, no “we’ll open a ticket,” no waiting for Monday. Guests were warned on every channel the same day the property asked for help.
The uncomfortable question
Here’s the question worth asking about your own operation: if this scam reached your guests on a Friday afternoon — and for many Grand Strand properties, it already has — how long would it take before your website, your social pages, and your front desk were all telling guests the same thing?
If the honest answer is “days,” or “I’d have to find out who to call,” that’s the gap this scam is engineered to exploit. The fraud moves in hours. The response has to move in hours too.
We’re happy to compare notes with any area property on what a same-day response plan looks like — no charge for the conversation, whether you work with us or not. And if your guests are receiving these messages right now: don’t wait. Get the warning up today.