If it's a cash reservation and the credit card isn't yours, I concur that this is probably just human error and not a scam.

I used to work at the Central Reservations office for a hotel chain. One of my jobs there was as a Trainer for new hire agents. No matter how much we told them to verify the profile that pops up on the screen (if the guest provided some information that was matched in the database), some agents will just continue without checking. That would be my guess as to what happened.

Sadly, the agent probably knew they made a massive mistake but were too embarrassed or lazy to fix it. I say that because of the secondary email address. An agent wouldn't do that unless they had the caller verify the one on the account only to discover it was different.

As with every job, half of employees at Central Reservations are below average. Some of them are at the far end of the bell curve.