Booking.com GotoGate Removed money from my credit card account without authority Amsterdam

Earlier this year my wife & I spent six weeks in Europe, enjoying a myriad of wonderful experiences. However, for the past 6 months I have been endeavoring to have money illegally removed from my credit card account returned.

You may be thinking this is some suspect transaction undertaken on our journey, but no, my futile attempts are with Booking.com who have used my customer profile to illegally remove money from my credit card account. In a nutshell I am supposed to have made two flight bookings on the same day to the same destination (but at different times). The fraudulent booking was confirmed with a non-existent e-mail address & mobile phone number and attributed to my member profile and hence charged to my credit card. My first knowledge of the illegal transaction was via my credit card statement. (The use of a non-existent e-mail address meant that I did not receive any confirmation of the booking)

Booking.com have strenuously denied any error or liability for the transaction standing behind their T&C’s of the consumer providing the correct e-mail address. In fact, they have chosen to totally ignore the seriousness of the issue. Like many major digital platform providers, security for the provider & consumer is paramount, yet in this case they have allowed the breach of their own security protocols and the use of their members private information to allow an illegal transaction to take place, whilst at the same time contradicting their own procedures of seeking authorization from their customer before a booking is undertaken.

In my case, fraudulent use of my private information and illegal removal of money from my private account without authorization are the issues that appear to be all too common when dealing with online travel agencies.