A thriving hotel and restaurant was the victim of a "malicious" prank when 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 missed out on around £4,000 in missed takings, reports 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.”
Some 23 false bookings were made, totalling 109 covers. The Peak District venue is now bringing in a deposit system and is investigating the prank with a view to handing over findings to the police.
He said: “It’s quite malicious really. 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."
Mr Myers, who also runs the Rafters restaurant in Sheffield, said that they’ll now be putting in place a deposit system.
He added: “We’ve always had a deposit system in Sheffield, because the restaurant is so small. 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.”
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