Vietnam Airlines has warned passengers of fraudulent websites that resemble its official booking page after some customers were reported to have bought fake tickets from those addresses.
The national flag carrier on Tuesday advised customers looking to make flight bookings to make sure that they are on the correct URL of www.vietnamairlines.com.
The warning was issued after several passengers had fallen victims of a number of fake websites that bear many similarities to Vietnam Airlines’ official booking site, from the interface, colors to the logo.
The only noticeable difference from the authentic site was some letters in their URL such as www.vietnamairslines.com and www.vietnamaairlines.com.
Further, customers may get cheated easily because their URLs always appear on the top of on a search engine result page whenever they seek to buy Vietnam Airlines air tickets, using popular key words such as ‘Vietnam Airlines’, ‘air ticket’, ‘air ticket promotion.’
As a consequence, the aforementioned websites’ operators fooled a lot of people for money or personal information.
Passengers performing transactions on these websites may suffer from fake tickets, overcharges, or personal information theft, Vietnam Airlines said in its statement.
The flag carrier affirmed that it recently sent a written request to competent authorities to handle websites with signs of violation regarding use of Vietnam Airlines’ logo, trademarks, images, website design copyright, public information disclosure, registration, as well as domain names that have the same or confusingly similar signs to trademarks and trade names of Vietnam Airlines.
Following that request, inspectors of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Science and Technology already checked and verified the names and addresses of these websites’ owners.
The inspectors also worked with those businesses and required them to remove contents infringing the trademark of Vietnam Airlines on their sites.
As a result, the owners of the two websites www.vietnamairlinesvn.com and www.vnairlines.com took the signs of violation of Vietnam Airlines’ trademark off the websites, with the first one even changing the URL.
Meanwhile, Vietnam Airlines and the authorities continue working together to verify the names, addresses, and owners of www.vietnamairslines.com and www.vietnamaairlines.com to resolve their infringements.
