To have reported this in work today?

[Sunshineforeverandever]

I work in a press office. Someone (claiming to be a journalist, I can’t verify that he was) called us this morning with a media enquiry, he provided me with a booking reference for the customer that his article was going to be about. I spent a large part of the day diligently investigating his media enquiry and it turns out the booking reference he gave me doesn’t exist on any of our internal systems and we had no record of the customer (he gave us their name) being involved with our company either. I decided to pass this to our legal team to investigate as I don’t think he was contacting us in good faith. My colleague (junior to me) says I overreacted by passing this to legal to look into to. Was I being unreasonable? I’m almost certain his enquiry wasn’t genuine (a few more reasons why but can’t go into them on here).

Any freelance journalist would have given you the name of the commissioning editor and the name of the publication and a searchable link to other pieces published.
It seems odd that you didn't have this information, had wrong booking information and yet your first activity was to spend time on a wild goose chase.
Why didn't you ask him for a link to the published online piece?

Let me tell you something re "legals" depts

Load of BS - if the claim appears to be less than the loss they won't bother, trust me.

Why don't you just contact them? You're not going to reach out your hands to them, are you?

Not necessarily true. I've been contacted by journalists from time to time, the freelancers didn't universally give me this information, and were perfectly genuine.

Not all freelancers would provide an editor and a portfolio link when they're asking for a quote.
Requests for quotes, sniffing around for stories, trying to stir up drama - are almost daily occurrences in a press office. And if it's an office accustomed to putting out puff pieces rather than responding to the media, then there should be a crisis comms policy for how to deal with potentially negative media.

I've never, ever known a freelance journalist provide details of their commissioning editor! However they do usually say which publication they are writing for. They rarely provide portfolio links either, although this info is normally easy to find on google.