pune travel agencies appear to have become soft targets of cyber criminals of late two travel firms of the city were recently duped of rs 7 lakh and rs 1 crore after they booked online tickets for fraudsters abroad a source from the industry revealed the chilling fact on saturday the fraudsters allegedly send the target travel agency a mail faking the email address of a known corporate client travel coordinator a corporate firm that the agency has a tie up with they request the agency in the email to issue air tickets for the coordinators overseas counterpart forwarding an email purportedly received from the latter the fraudsters allegedly use email addresses almost identical to the purported corordinators overseas counterpart unless the potential victim is highly vigilant it is difficult to differentiate between a genuine email address and a fake one for instance if the original email address is xyzinternationalabccouk they send mails having the address xyzinternationalabccouk the travel agencies easily fall prey because they often dealt with the firms india office both the travel company concerned and the india office making the referral are taken for a ride several travel companies in the country have been duped in this manner prompting the travel agents federation of india tafi issue a precautionary circular to all federation members explaining how the fraud works among other things the circular brought to their attention that the fake email is likely to give revamping of the companys global travel desk as an excuse for ticketing with the local travel agency it added that in one case the travel agency got suspicious wondering as to why all tickets requested were for immediate travel for group movements and why the director of a multinational company had called for the tickets himself it was then discovered that the email was fake the pune chapter of the travel agents association of india taai is also in the process of roping in cyber crime experts to make travel companies aware of such frauds speaking to toi a representative of one of the victim agencies said the fraudster had studied the corporate firm with which we have a tieup beforehand the firm also has an office in the uk the fraudster impersonated the firms ukbased travel coordinator created a mirror email address replicating its official email address and sent an email to the firms travel coordinator in india winning his confidence the india travel coordinator then got in touch with the travel agency and requested it to book several expensive tickets for people in the firms uk branch we did just that as we trusted the india travel coordinator with whom we had old ties the victim added only recently another travel company in the city received such a call but its owner somehow thought it could be be a trap mehboob shaikh the director of travel elect pvt ltd recounted his encounter with the fraudster who called himself john jackson we deal with multinational companies having offices abroad hackers