A restaurant and hotel in the Peak District was the victim of a malicious prank after almost its entire Sunday service was booked out fraudulently.
Rafters At Riverside House in Ashford-in-the-Water, near Bakewell, which holds two AA rosettes and is listed in the Michelin Guide, could have lost out on almost £4,000.
Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, owner Alistair Myers said: “We had a no show last Saturday, who we’d tried to call, but it kept ringing out, so we thought that was a bit suspicious.
“And we confirm all our future bookings during the week, a courtesy call about dietary requirements, allergies, so we can be prepared.
“So as we’re doing it for this coming Sunday, there are loads of wrong numbers. Customers might give us a wrong number occasionally, it happens.
“So we start using the email addresses instead, to confirm the bookings, and now they keep bouncing back.
“We start looking into it, thinking ‘this can’t be right’. So we look at the IP addresses used, and one person on January 3 in a two hour period, has made all these bookings.
“They filled our entire Sunday lunch up for us.”
In all, 23 false bookings were made, amounting to 109 covers in total.
Myers says that with a conservative average spend of £40 per head, they would have lost well over £4,000.
“Had we not noticed, it would have been catastrophic for us,” he went on.
“It’s an absolute nightmare. We turn people away on Sundays because we are full, and we have turned others away already for this weekend.”
It is now bringing in a deposit system and is investigating the prank with a view to handing over findings to the police.
Myers has said that his team is now concentrating on getting this weekend’s service full again.
“Rather than focus on the negative energy that someone has brought to our door, our first task is to work out how we can get a full restaurant again, get it out there that we have tables available.”
But he will also be looking into whether there is a case to give to the police.
“It’s quite malicious really,” he said. “It’s either a prank, or someone being horrible to us. We’d have bought all the food in, and we serve quite expensive beef. It would have been a disaster.
“So our next port of call is to have someone investigate these IP addresses, and then report it. It falls under the computer misuse act.”
Myers, who also runs the Rafters restaurant in Sheffield, said that they’ll now be putting in place a deposit system.
“We’ve always had a deposit system in Sheffield, because the restaurant is so small,” he said.
“But we’d always been reluctant to do it at the Derbyshire restaurant because people can be put off by it.
“It’ll just make sure people can’t attack us like this again. Sadly, the minority has ruined that for the majority.”
