A hacker has targeted a business and left them with "thousands of pounds" of lost revenue.

Alex Souter, who owns The Panic Room based in Gravesend with his wife Monique, says they first noticed something was wrong in December.

The cyber attacks have been causing chaos with the booking system at their entertainment centre at the St George's Centre, which runs activities including laser tag, escape rooms and mini golf.

Alex said: "We've kept quiet as we've been trying to deal with it, but it seems that it's not stopping so we are speaking up.

"Since December our company has been targeted by a hacker who has been causing massive disruption to our booking system.

"They created an automatic attack on last-minute bookings, and the attack would add all of our available games into fake baskets meaning our actual customers couldn't see anything able to be booked on our website."

Staff would have to manually remove the booking from baskets only for them to appear again a few minutes later.

"Given we do 20 different experiences, this has a big impact," he said.

"We weren't sure what was occurring and just tried to keep an eye on it however it kept getting worse and only happening on peak days."

He said it became more and more apparent that it was a person and not just a glitch or coincidence.

"For our escape rooms there are a maximum amount of players depending on the experience," he explained.

"By checking our booking system we were able to see that somehow the rooms in baskets were set to two higher than the maximum which isn't possible to do.

"We contacted our booking system regarding the issue and after investigation, they found that this was a targeted attack and that other users of the same booking software weren't affected."

He added that due to the nature of the attacks they "firmly believe that it is either a competitor or a marketing company that is using illegal means to get themselves or their client more bookings."

Some works were made to fix how the attacker was doing it which seemed to stop it temporarily, however it has started again.

Now, the bookings in the baskets are only for the room-minimum which makes them indistinguishable from real bookings.

He continued: "Last night, our entire evening of bookings was completely clogged up with games in baskets which lead to many games being unable to be booked.

"This has led to a great deal of extra stress and a waste of resources.

"Having survived the pandemic through our own hard work on online experiences and then taking hit after hit with inflating costs including electricity which has caused costs in some buildings to quadruple, to then have someone actively targeting our business is painful and hurtful.

"It's also wasting our customer service team's time, as they are having to carefully remove slots from baskets that we believe to be fraudulent.

"Due to the issues we are then having an increased phone call load due to people having to call to check if it's actually available or not instead of just being able to book online themselves."

The ordeal has cost the business "thousands of pounds" of lost revenue, which impacts the staff because if bookings are restricted then so are the hours they need to work.

The family entertainment centre was also broken into while they were renovating last year.

It was reported that four suspects forced entry to the commercial premises, and the only items which seemed to have been stolen were two screwdrivers.

Alex said: "We will continue and persevere working with action fraud and our booking system provider to try and get a resolution however we don't know how soon this may be.

"We are currently looking to change booking systems due to this vulnerability in the software, which is a shame as we have been with the provider since we first started back in 2016."

The Panic Room opened its doors at the end of last year in 13,000 sq ft unit at the back of a former BHS store.

Alex and Monique transformed it into a hub of futuristic and arcade-style games.