Amoma.com is a scam (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Amoma.com is a scam (2017)

medium.com

45 pointsValentineC14 comments

The thing I find the most interesting is

> On July 20th, I got a call from my boss. I needed to be in San Francisco on July 23rd.

> I had a hotel budget of $280 a night

> here is what I saw on my company’s internal travel site (bookings for double the budget)

At this point, I would reach out to my boss and ask "Do I book it at twice the budget?". If my boss says yes, the company covers it. If my boss says no, then I don't go. It's as simple as that.

If my boss says no, then I don't go.

That's the right decision, is he supposed to cover the difference out of pocket?

And it gets worse. This also happened: I adjusted the filters and looked everywhere. After about 3 hours searching I couldn’t find a hotel for under $280 anywhere in the city.

Now there's a productive use of employee time! How much did that cost the company?

This is one of the most fantastic things about corporations.

My last employer thought nothing of asking people to travel on a moments notice. We had 500 million in revenue, and they'd fight you over a few dollars for travel while eschewing any responsibility for the situation it created.

Interesting story, but what are we supposed to "learn" from it? Obviously we won't use this company for bookings, but what's the bigger takeaway?

Partners of kayak may be scammers? That's news to me, so that's useful to know.

American Express had good customer service? The fact that the author had to follow up to get a full refund indicates that it wasn't the most streamlined process ever.

Is there another lesson here?

Yeah, I don't think the article had a thesis at all. It was more of a narrative of events he'd experienced.

I got a similar sinking feeling just a few days ago right after booking a flight through Kayak. It was a too-good-to-be-true rate on a flight from Boston to Barcelona with a company called Vayama. Vayama runs lots of little scams, like selling airline tickets before actually buying them from the airline, and cancelling the order if the flight fills up or they can't purchase them profitably. A quick web search shows hundreds (thousands?) of complaints against Vayama, but Kayak keeps pimping them.

Some people seem to say that using Vayama worked out for them, but with my trip 3 weeks away still I'm pretty on edge.

We're supposed to learn that Kayak is pants now, and they should feel bad.

You need a flight booking number to know if you actually have a ticket booked. If you've that, you're fine, if not, you have more planning to do.

>Interesting story, but what are we supposed to "learn" from it? Obviously we won't use this company for bookings, but what's the bigger takeaway?

Why there has to be some "bigger takeaway"?

The title of the post itself says "Amoma.com is a scam". It doesn't say anything about teaches us larger things about life, the universe, and everything.

It's a personal story that explains why Amoma.com is a scam, and what happened to the author.

Not everything is some guidebook, or research paper, or philosophical study. It's a blog post.

I don't think they are a scam. I have used them twice at least in Belgium and Germany when their offer was cheaper than the competition. The worst thing that happened was that the room was sold as tax included, but of course the Brussels room tax had to be paid to the hotel on the spot in addition. While this is fraud in the strict sense, it happens in Brussels all the time on all sites. I have no idea how their business model works and I am not to defend them. But I guess the author was just the victim of a "normal" mess-up with more rooms given to various booking systems in total than available in reality. And of course poor customer service which is standard for most companies doing business on the internet.

The author "confirmed" its a scam because the hotel didn't have any open rooms, but many travel sites have a separate inventory of rooms they pay for (booked or not) and resell. Those rooms wouldn't be open for direct booking.

There's a company right now running facebook ads for a suspiciously low priced DSLR camera gimbal ($49 for a product that should cost $1200) which nobody is having any success getting FB to take down. It goes to a credit card processing page. I want to know what the end goal is of outright scams like this. Doesn't the payment processing arrangement get yanked pretty quick once the percentage of chargebacks rises above a few percent of the total number of transactions?

https://imgur.com/a/F0Uea8a

> I want to know what the end goal is of outright scams like this.

collect credit card information?

He says after receiving the email he knew it had to be a scam. How did he know? It didn’t look official enough? I think I’m missing something.

As a total 100% complete side note, if you're in need of a cheap room in SF, take a look at the San Remo. It's always been the cheapest for me and it's got tons of character. Make sure you're comfortable with the room size and shared bathrooms though.

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