Peak District restaurant devastated after malicious prankster books out every Sunday table

A restaurant and hotel in the Peak District was the victim of a malicious prank after almost its entire Sunday service was booked out fraudulently.

Rafters At Riverside House in Ashford-in-the-Water, near Bakewell, which holds two AA rosettes and is listed in the Michelin Guide, could have lost out on almost £4,000.

Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, owner Alistair Myers said: “We had a no show last Saturday, who we’d tried to call, but it kept ringing out, so we thought that was a bit suspicious.

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“And we confirm all our future bookings during the week, a courtesy call about dietary requirements, allergies, so we can be prepared.

“So as we’re doing it for this coming Sunday, there are loads of wrong numbers. Customers might give us a wrong number occasionally, it happens.

“So we start using the email addresses instead, to confirm the bookings, and now they keep bouncing 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.

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

In all, 23 false bookings were made, amounting to 109 covers in total.

Myers says that with a conservative average spend of £40 per head, they would have lost well over £4,000.

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

“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 is now bringing in a deposit system and is investigating the prank with a view to handing over findings to the police.

Myers has said that his team is now concentrating on getting this weekend’s service full again.

“Rather than