In my opinion booking com had to take the responsibility to save their reputation. If it's 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, the booking had to compensate. Either way those are business'es and they have obligations to their clients. But in their protection – if clients were specificaly stupid, like in opened some dumb shady link to third party payment systems, from chat or something like that level stupid, then client is to blame himself. Each case had to be investigated in detail. P.S. Journalists had to put more effort, not jus report in the style he told this and other he told that and then to leave hanging. That's slightly shitting on everybodies reputation, including the clients, cause probably they could be the dumb ones also. Yet, no clues or details to understand what realy happened there, exept that money been lost – not a good article.