Alert for the scam of table reservations on fake restaurant websites such as Disfrutar or El Celler de Can Roca

BarcelonaIt's the big scam of online table reservations. You want to go eat at the Disfrutar restaurants in Barcelona or El Celler de Can Roca, with all the illusion in the world that it implies just thinking about it, and you go to the website to make an online reservation. You find a table for the very next day (what luck!), and when you have entered all your personal details, they ask you to pay the full menu. You do so, and on the day you show up at the restaurant, they tell you they have no reservation in your name. “In recent weeks we have been encountering this constantly, and we don't stop reporting it to the Mossos d’Esquadra”, states Eduard Xatruch, from the Disfrutar restaurant, who adds that these fake websites manage to be well-positioned on Google to the point that they appear first when someone simply types in the search engine: "Disfrutar Barcelona".

The scam of restaurant websites consists of copying the originals exactly, but the domain, technically called the URL, changes. It is the first clue of the deception. In both the case of Disfrutar and El Celler de Can Roca, the name of the website does not contain any hyphen, neither lower nor upper, but appears whole. They are: www.disfrutarbarcelona.com and www.cellercanroca.com. To continue, neither of the two restaurants ask to pay the cost of the entire menu. In both the case of Disfrutar and El Celler de Can Roca, they only request the credit card number. And this data is crucial, because on fake websites, it is mandatory to pay in advance the cost of the menu for all the people who will attend. In this way, fake restaurant websites can get a large amount of money at once.

To continue, other clues to detect the scam are that in neither of the two restaurants can you find a table for the next day or even for a month from now. In the case of El Celler de Can Roca, reservations open once a month to be able to go a year later. So this June 1st they will open them at 00.00 am to be able to go in April 2027. On the other hand, at Disfrutar, reservations can be made once a day, also at the same time, and the table will also be for a year later. "We are very sorry about this situation, because in these cases the first feeling clients get is that their money has been stolen," comments Xatruch, who adds that they always report all cases, and that is why they also warn about it on their social networks, because they want clients to be aware of it. This same week, El Celler de Can Roca also shared the scam on Instagram. "So far we have managed to get these fake websites to close automatically as soon as we find out about them, and in most cases people have been able to recover the money they had paid," concludes the chef Eduard Xatruch.