With the summer comes peak season for scammers coming up with new ways to empty tourists’ wallets — increasingly, by getting their hands on travelers’ personal financial information. Here are five tricks to be on the lookout for, especially if you’re planning a getaway.  The fake front desk call. It’s the middle of the night, and the phone rings in your room. Waking up from a sound sleep in a strange bed, you’re disoriented anyway, so you might not question the caller when he says he’s calling from the front desk. There’s been some kind of computer glitch, and they need to verify the credit card information you have on file. But it’s not the front desk. That was a scam artist calling you, and if you give him your credit card information, he’ll run up all kinds of crazy charges on your card before you get up in the morning. Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for advocacy group U.S. PIRG, says he’s heard “a lot of recent stories“ about this scam. It’s gotten so bad in touristy Jekyll Island, Ga., that local hoteliers have started putting up signs warning guests that the “front desk clerk” asking politely for their credit card number is really a fraud. (MORE: Old ‘Nigerian Lottery’ Scam Gets a New Twist) Or not so politely, in some cases. Local authorities discovered that some of the calls were made by inmates at Georgia state prisons using cell phones smuggled in by visitors. These guys aren’t as nice as your average hospitality-industry employee: One played hardball when a guest (sensibly) balked at giving out his credit card information, threatening to come up and throw the guest out of the hotel. The spoofed wi-fi hot spot. Frozen drink poolside? That’s fine — but you might want to avoid the pineapple. In hacker-speak, a “pineapple” is device used to create a fake wi-fi hotspot that looks like a legitimate one. Crooks will give it a similar or identical name to a hotel or coffee shop’s actual hotspot and wait for people to … Continue reading 5 Summer Travel Scams to Avoid