Travel Review Tips by The Avanti Group: Holiday villa fraud that's hit countless British families

You arrive at that dream villa to find the owner's never heard of you - and you sent your cash to a chillingly plausible conman

For Chris and Annia Pegg, a two-week break in the South of France every summer is the perfect way to unwind. The couple and their two little girls take a scenic drive down through the French countryside before arriving at their rented gite.

‘We choose locations with their own pool where the children can play and we can just get away from it all,’ says Chris, 42, an IT manager from Tamworth, Staffs.

This January, the couple and their daughters, Jessica, nine, and Emily, seven, were more in need of a quiet break than ever.

‘My father-in-law had been diagnosed with cancer, so it had been a rather stressful few months,’ Chris explains.

Just after Christmas, Annia, 39, a teaching assistant, went onto the Owners Direct website to search for a property.

The family — like more than 500,000 Britons who booked their holiday through it last year — love the site for the sheer variety that it offers.

Owners Direct, which was launched in 1997, works like an online travel brochure. Thousands of properties are advertised on the site, from cheap, cheerful apartments to luxury houses costing several thousands a week.

Owners pay the site £219 a year to advertise their properties — and reach a much larger audience than if they had advertised privately in magazines and on the internet.

Holidaymakers browse through the properties to find one they like, then contact the owners ‘direct’ by clicking the ‘Enquire Now’ button.

During this process, the renters fill out an online form that asks for their email address. The villa owner then receives an email from Owners Direct to say someone wants to rent his property. He can access their details by clicking on the link and logging in to his Owners Direct account.

From then on, owner and renter deal directly to arrange contracts and payments.

Of course, there is always an element of caveat emptor — buyer beware — when buying anything online and this is no different. And now the website is at the centre of a scandal that’s affected at least 12,000 property renters worldwide.

It is thought hackers may have stolen more than £25 million from holidaymakers — hundreds or even thousands believed to be British — in the past five years. And victims believe the police are doing little about it.

‘We’ve used Owners Direct for years with no problem, so when Annia spotted a place in a pretty little town called Fiac, she emailed the property owner via the website,’ says Chris.

‘A man called Hamish responded and, after we’d corresponded over email, we agreed to rent out the property in the first week of August.

Hamish, emailing from a Hotmail account, asked if we could send the money to his online Barclays bank account.

‘I thought it a little odd to ask for all the money at once but because we didn’t want to lose it, we paid £1,650 into Hamish’s bank account and that was that.’

But the Peggs’ money had not been deposited into the property owner’s account at all. Yes, the property owner was called Hamish. But retired solicitor Hamish Porter had no idea the family were keen to rent his holiday home, let alone that he had allegedly been ‘paid’ for the privilege.

Hackers had intercepted the Peggs’ messages. It is believed they do this by sending owners like Hamish a fake enquiry from a potential renter — which looks just like a genuine Owners Direct enquiry.

When the owner clicks on the link, it takes him not to the genuine Owners Direct page, but to a fraudulent duplicate webpage created by the hacker.