Vacation scams are common

With a small amount information, you can avoid losing your cash to a hot mail fraud crime. A common example of a scam that has lived on for many years is the travel scam, whereby a business offers a "cost free" vacation that ends up costing you a lot of cash. Some old scams never disappear.

The envelope comes in the mail and tells you that you have "won" a holiday to some exciting place. You are very excited, as you seldom seem to win contests. Then the trouble starts. You get in touch with the company about the winnings and find that they need a credit card number from you because you must prepay a "cash deposit" of a few hundred dollars. In the end, it turns out that the holiday wasn't free and it wasn't fun. You wound up staying in a cheap hotel that was blocks from the ocean and you had to listen to a timeshare sales pitch, as well.

Free travel scams have been around for ages, and they are still successful. Travel scams are, like many similar financial scams, a way to steal someone's money. Americans just can't pass up anything that arrives in the mailbox that tells them that they have won something. At worst, these travel scams are a means of identity theft, and there is no free travel at all; just theft of your credit card account and similar personal information.

Here are a few tips that will help you avoid being victimized in this ancient financial scam:

• Do you always arrange vacations via companies that send you unsolicited letters or brochures in the mail? Hardly anyone books travel via mail from strange organizations. You should anticipate that any unsolicited letter that offers cost free travel is a scam, especially if it says you have "won" a prize and you don't remember entering a contest recently.
• Remember - if you have to pay, it isn't free. Look over the fine print carefully. A lot of of these "cost free" holiday promotions really require that you cough up money. The ugly, expensive details are often buried in the very small text on the back of the letter, which may resemble a gift certificate.
• Many offers of prizes, including "no-cost" travel, are mail that is designed to resemble certified mail. Be suspicious when reading brochures that seem to offer a great deal for no charge. It is easy to make bulk mail look like important mail, just by inserting phrases like "Urgent: Reply Right away."
• Check on the World Wide Web or get in touch with the Better Business Bureau in the city where the company is located to find out if the organization is honest. Do some investigation on the corporation marketing the travel.
• Do research with the airlines or hotels described to be certain that they are participating in this vacation, especially if the offer is for free travel.
• Do some research before you make a travel purchase Even if the offer specifies that the trip requires money, you may find that it's a crummy package that you could have booked yourself at a lower price by means of the Internet or a travel agent. Just because the letter or brochure says it's an excellent deal doesn't make it a great deal.

The wise adage works well here: deals that strike you as too good to be true usually are. Should you desire to take a trip, see a travel agent. You have better things to do than to help out scammers, so don't squander your time on these crimes and fraud. There are a large number of criminals out there that are interested in either identity theft or just stealing your money.