Your hotel room safe isn’t safe at all!
When you travel, you have to take a lot of stuff with you and some of that stuff is very valuable, like your phone, passport and wallet. Apart from the fact that it costs a lot of money to replace this stuff, it’s also extremely frustrating to lose something when you’re abroad. So, when you go to the hotel pool or the beach you’ll probably choose to leave your valuables in the hotel room safe, right?
It’s not as safe as you might think.
Code
Most hotel room safes let you enter your own code. That way, nobody but you will know what code needs to be entered to reach your valuable belongings. That sounds pretty safe, right? Frequent traveler Brad Reid discovered that this isn’t really the case…
Default code
Brad had left his belongings in the safe in his hotel room and had headed out. He explains that he’d come across this type of safe before in other hotels, so he was familiar with the model. You need to enter the code you want to use and then press the lock button to lock the safe. After doing this, you can only open the safe with the exact same code. Although… That’s the idea, but Brad found out that there’s also a default password to open the safe with. He’d forgotten which code he’d used to lock away his stuff and had to ask someone at the hotel desk to open it for him. He then saw the employee enter the code ‘000000’, which opened the safe!
Safety
This code is the default code for the safe, which means that anyone can open the safe if they just enter a couple of zeroes! That makes it a little bit too easy for thieves to steal your stuff, doesn’t it? And not just thieves entering the hotel unnoticed; cleaners and other employees can also very simply enter your room and steal your stuff if they were so inclined. So, from now on, always test whether the hotel room safe can be opened by entering a series of zeroes before leaving your stuff behind.
Want to see Brad showing you how this works? Watch the video:
Read more: This is why it’s dangerous to add a luggage tag to your luggage!
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Bron: Flair, Youtube | Beeld: video still YouTube