Originally Posted by
3544quebec
While I appreciate the support and agree that that would really put a bomb under the guilty parties there is no way on this earth that I would even contemplate involving the police in this. They have much more important things to do than spent half an hour discussing with me what is essentially a commercial dispute based on a stupid error and sloppy practices rather than a criminal act.
Hell, I felt guilty filing a police report when I was a victim to a pickpocket in Barcelona losing E800 knowing that the Mozos de Escuadra ( or Mossos d'Esquadra for those Catalan nationalists amongst us) didn't have a hope in hell of retrieving my wallet and were not resourced to follow up such petty crime. The only reason that I filed then was that if I hadn't my credit card companies would have held me responsible for any charges that the thieves made opening me up to the risk of thousands of euro in liabilities.
But for a E135 incorrect charge from a hotel, as much as I would love to present HI Brussels and Amex a police report, that's not going to happen (perhaps condemning myself to months of dispute)
Absolutely right, I haven't even begun playing my trump cards
In many localities, you can file a police report of this sort online and get a report number, taking very little, if any, of an officer's time (I believe the cases are reviewed before getting an official report number, but that wouldn't take much given that there's not much they can do except have the incident recorded in case it's needed later).
Given that, at least initially, AMEX and the hotel seemed satisfied that it was someone who identified himself as you that made the reservation (the only possible explanation for upholding the charge), it seems entirely reasonable to file an identify theft report and have that as additional leverage. I might have even considered a letter to the person who did make the reservation, copied to the hotel and AMEX, accusing them of giving your information fraudulently. That might wake the hotel up to determine exactly what happened on their end...