Referral Fraud at MakeMyTrip

Customer service is of utmost importance to us at MakeMyTrip. We believe ‘we are because our users are’. In the month of September, we launched a ‘Refer and Earn’ programme to encourage new users on our mobile app and provide them with an amazing travel booking experience.

However, over the past few days, we have detected that some of our users have been violating our terms of service by using fraudulent ways to earn bonus cash in their My Wallet account using our programme. Such users have used fake email IDs in an attempt to try and fool our systems. At MakeMyTrip, we have invested in world-class systems and processes to detect fraud at all levels of our eco-system. As a result of this, we were able to detect these cases proactively.

We take fraud very seriously and it saddened us to see some users violate our terms and conditions as outlined in the ‘Refer and Earn’ programme. The specific clause has been outlined below:

“2. MakeMyTrip may suspend or terminate the Refer and Earn program or any user's ability to participate in the program at any time for any reason at their discretion. Bonus cash earned as a result of fraudulent activities will be revoked and deemed invalid. Any bookings made through Bonus cash earned through fraudulent activities will be cancelled with no further liability on MakeMyTrip. This is without prejudice to the legal remedies available to MakeMyTrip against the person who earned fraudulent bonus cash or made bookings through it.”

We have been cancelling the abovementioned fraud bookings by following a due course of pre-communication with each customer, offering them a chance to get back to us with an explanation of their actions. All cases where we were able to get valid customer replies were honoured, but the vast majority of these users did not send us any replies, thereby validating that their means were fraudulent in the first place.

To elaborate on the scale of misconduct, we would also like to share that there were a particular set of fraudsters who were selling their MakeMyTrip MyWallet accounts, which was credited using fraudulent means over social channels. Few genuine users who bought these wallets under the impression that these were legitimate wallets were cheated. Some of them have committed to support our stand against the fraudsters. We will also be pressing legal charges against these fraudsters who have grossly violated our terms of services.

We wish to seek support from our users in our stand and push towards an internet ecosystem which provides ‘genuine value addition’ to end users. If you are aware of any individuals or groups who are violating our services using such mechanisms, please write to us at mobilefeedback@makemytrip.com and we will take immediate action.

Sincerely,
The MakeMyTrip Team