Chinese hotel chain’s customer data on Dark Web – 500M records for $50K | Cyber Security

When you stay in a hotel, you’re often visiting only temporarily.

You’ll usually be leaving soon – probably going back to your home town, or on to your next destination, which could be in another state or even in another country.

In other words, by the time the hotel realises you’ve drained the minibar, flooded the bathroom and indulged in your rockstar fantasy of flinging the TV out of the window into the swimming pool, you might not only have vanished from their radar but also left their jurisdiction altogether.

So it’s not surprising that hotels want precise and verifiable details about you, including ID, home address and payment card data.

In fact, in many countries – the UK is one of them – hoteliers have effectively been co-opted as field staff for the government’s immigration department, and are legally obliged to collect and hold onto passport data for some or all visitors.

You often have little choice but to hand over the data that’s requested at the reception desk – if you refuse, you might find yourself faced with the prospect of spending the night on the street, in an unfamiliar city, surrounded by your luggage.