There’s a new pizza scam happening at hotels across the country that you should know about before it’s too late.
Current Events :
We’ve all been there before. You arrive at a hotel late at night after a long day of travel. You’re hungry and tired and just want a quick bite to eat before bed. Once inside the room, you’re magically met with a couple of delivery menus that were slid under the door beforehand offering fast food delivery to the hotel.
Eureka! Was someone reading your hungry mind? Actually, no. Someone was (very likely) trying to rope you into a new traveler’s pizza scam.
Sadly, that convenient food delivery menu that showed up under your room door may not be what it seems. Or, in other words, don’t always believe everything you see and hear.
In a recent story shared on The Daily Dot, TikToker Leslie Gaytan (@mustbeleslieg) created a video to describe how she nearly fell for the pizza scam and is warning travelers not to become victims, too.
According to Gaytan, her ordeal occurred while staying at a hotel in San Antonio, Texas.
“If you’re staying in hotels in San Antonio, Texas, do not order pizza, I repeat, do not order pizza from a place called House of Pizza,” Gaytan warned.
“We just left San Antonio yesterday and we stayed in a hotel there, right? When we first got to the hotel, we opened the door to a room and there was 3 fliers on the floor and it was like pizza. We’re starving. It was like 10:30 at night” she began.
A special deal from House of Pizza interested her. Although a Google search showed the restaurant as “permanently closed,” Gaytan called the restaurant anyway and was ecstatic when someone answered the phone.
“I give her the address of the hotel and she was like, ‘OK, are you going to be paying with cash or card?'” she continued. “I only have cash on me. So I said I’m gonna be paying cash. As soon as I said that, the line kind of like took a pause and then somebody else took the phone.”
Gaytan said she placed her order with a different person and waited patiently for the food to arrive. However, after several hours without the food arriving, her boyfriend suggested they research House of Pizza online.
Gaytan went to Yelp and discovered multiple negative reviews:
“The majority of people were saying that they never received their food. They never received their order. That the pizza or the food never came.”
Realizing something was wrong, she attempted to call House of Pizza but discovered that her number had been blocked.
“That got me thinking, it’s a scam,” she told her viewers. And, she was right.
House of Pizza no longer existed. The pizza scam thieves stole the name of the now-closed restaurant, printed up some flyers, created a burner/disposable phone number as their business phone, slid flyers under hotel doors across the city, and then waited for unsuspecting travelers to call and place an order.
The thing that saved Gaytan was her desire to pay with cash. Had she opted to pay with a credit card, she would have handed over her card details, name, address, and more to what she thought was a legitimate business — but was merely a scam. They would have drained her credit card dry.
“If I had offered them a card number, we still wouldn’t have got a pizza. But now, they would have had my credit card info.”
Several viewers claiming to be hotel workers or San Antonio residents corroborated Gaytan’s allegations as true.
“Yes, this is true. I worked in hotels downtown and when we see them putting flyers we call security,” said Christal (@5k_mommy).
“So true. Work at hotel here in SA and got a lot of complaints from guests about this place,” another viewer commented.
‘Yess girl. I work at a hotel downtown and we always tell guests to not order from the flyers and give them other recommendations,” Luisa Smith (@fernandita_477) added.
So, here’s a word to the wise to avoid the pizza scam. The next time you’re traveling and want to order food delivery to your hotel room, call the front desk and ask for a recommendation. DO NOT order from menus that were slid under your door or found on your counter. You have no idea who left them there or if they’re even legit.
OK WASSUP! covers Current Events:
WARNING: Watch out for this pizza scam while traveling.
Thanks for sharing this DJ!
I rarely ever order out when staying at a hotel but this is good information to know.