In my opinion booking com has to take the blame to save their reputation. If it’s a each hotels account administrator bad practice (week pass, stupid email links opening, ignoring whats hapening with their account, etc…), then hotels had to be made to compensate, if fault lies in bookings.com bad practices working with those accounts managers. Either way those are business’es and they have obligations to their clients. In their protection, I note – if clients were specificaly stupid, like in opened some dumb shady link to third party payment systems, ofered in a simple chat or something like that level stupid, then client is to blame himself. Each case had to be investigated in detail. Journalists had to put more effort, not jus report in the style he told this and he told this and to leave it to hang, slightly shitting on everybodies reputation in the article (including the clients, cause probably they could be the dumb ones also, but no clues or details to understand what realy happened there, exept that money been lost).