'Malicious' prankster makes 23 fake bookings at Rafters at The Riverside Hotel restaurant

The restaurant at Rafters at the Riverside Hotel in Ashford-in-the-Water, derbyshire, almost lost a whole day's worth of business last Sunday after someone fraudulently booked up most of the restaurant's tables

Chef patron Tom Lawson of the two AA Rosette, Michelin-listed restaurant wrote on social media that the business had never encountered no-shows or fake reservations on this scale before, as the 23 bookings added up to 109 covers - a potential loss of £4,000, with a conservative estimate of a £40 a head spend.

Owner Alistair Myers told The Manchester Evening News that the team realised what had happened when they made the usual calls to confirm reservations, and repeatedly found that the numbers provided were wrong. 

Fake numbers, identical IP address

Then, when sending confirmation emails, the same thing - they bounced 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," Alistair said.

“They filled our entire Sunday lunch up for us.”

“Had we not noticed, it would have been catastrophic for us,” he said.

“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’s quite malicious really,” he added. “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."

The restaurant is now introducing a deposit system for bookings, and is working on identifying the culprit by tracking down the IP address from which all of the bookings were made in view of handing over information to the police.

The decision to introduce the deposit system was a reluctant one, as it is already in place at the Sheffield branch of Rafters as it can put guests off making a reservation in the first place.

“It’ll just make sure people can’t attack us like this again. Sadly, the minority has ruined that for the majority," Alistair said.