Last month I wrote about scammers taking over an old Singapore Airlines phone number and pretending to be Singapore Airlines when customers call. They charge high fees for basic services the airline would normally provide for free, like helping with seat assignments.
And I shared that last summer a former boss of mine got scammed by a phone number for Delta provided to her by her travel agency. The agents pretending to be Delta charged her $1,000 to move her and her granddaughter to flights the next day when their original itinerary was cancelled. (Delta Air Lines shockingly covered the cost after 9 months.)
Now there’s a report of a passenger being scammed after calling the wrong number for United Airlines.
- They were flying from Tampa to Dubai via Newark. Their first flight was delayed, and they misconnected.
- United’s automatic rebooking for the next day didn’t work for them, so the ‘airline’ agent quoted them $1,600 per person (in economy) for travel on United’s partner Emirates that would get them in with enough time to make business meetings. They took it.
Only it wasn’t actually United that they spoke to. It appears to have been a company called Fly Vault Travels with one star and an F rating from the Better Business Bureau.
Other customers have reported that they reached these people trying to contact United and that they impersonate Hawaiian Airlines and JetBlue as well:
I googled JetBlue’s customer service number, and clicked the click-to-call button in a Google search ad that described itself as JetBlue customer service, which immediately dialed. When a representative named Bob White picked up at the Fly Vault Deals number, misrepresenting himself as an authorized agent at JetBlue (at no point did he state that he works for an affiliate or a non-JetBlue reseller), took my information including credit card, address, email address, phone number, and flight reservation details. He even “waved a fee” for a flight change as if he were a JetBlue agent.
Upon allegedly “changing the reservation” he EMAILED me with the credit card authorization with phony boilerplate language, and asked me to write back to the email while talking to him on the phone, encouraging to “just write back ‘I confirm'” and to ignore the fine print (which is that this company is in no way shape or form affiliated with JetBlue).
Here’s what makes them so effective. The customer thinks they’re dealing with the airline. They’re told they have no other options but to pay. And travelers, desperate for help, clearly agree to be charged. (Of course they wouldn’t agree but for these false pretenses.) Here’s an explanation, purportedly from the scammer themselves:
We take money as a travel agency, we do jot make fake bookings. We send a consent email before we do any business with any new customer. In consent email your flight, our company info, price for business, terms of use and refund policy is mentioned. If customer agrees to it than we start our proceedings. We take payments in credit card where customer can dispute a charge within period of 90 days. This is how a legal business operates in United States. We charge, what customer authorize with us and same info is always present on an email which we sent to customer.
Google’s ads at the top of search results increasingly look like real results! So don’t just Google airline’s phone number and assume that is.. the airline’s phone number. Pull up their number on the airline’s website or through the airline’s mobile app (except for Frontier Airlines, where no phone number is offered). When your travel agency provides the wrong number it’s hard to fault the customer, but that’s really on the agency. And airline numbers do change, especially for carriers with a smaller presence in the U.S. Let’s be careful out there.
Thank you Gary for another very helpful article. I usually rely on twitter support now (although that may be changing if airlines pull out their twitter support) but who doesn’t google phone number for companies…
This has been going on in the hotel industry for many, many years. Folks Google the hotel name and they get an ad with a phone number that appears to be from the hotel, but it’s more likely a shady 3rd party booking site that charges high fees. I know people who have been scammed. It’s a scourge and scammers are everywhere.
this happened to me with Etihad. I tried contacting them to book an award flight and it was sent to a consolidator. Good thing they had no idea about how partner awards worked and I quickly realized they were trying to scam me. They even had the audacity to text me after I hung up on them.
Pretty easy to spot a fake if you are not a dumbass
Except for Frontier Airlines who aren’t on the phone…. hahaha I’d give them a miss
Happened to me on a AA flight from MCO to YUL. AA emailed me to advise that my flight would be rescheduled due to weather, and that I should call AA reservations if I didn’t like the proposed schedule change.
The first 3 hits when I Googled “AA reservation” were 3rd party ticket bookers who wanted to charge me for something that AA offers for free.
Lesson learned: Program the airlines and hotels reservations and customer numbers directly in your cell phones. Google is all about making the $$ per click.
Google intentionally misleads people with sponsored ads. Usually there is small print that indicates it is an ad….but this can be easily overlooked especially to novices, or even experienced people under stress or in a hurry. It pays to be EXTRA EXTRA careful when using google. Their business model of selling ads to the highest bidder for top placement has made them a behemoth but it’s a somewhat shady business practice. These advertisers often pretend to be something they are NOT.
@Bob – Problem is, there are A LOT of dumbasses.
Well, it’s also that airlines, like so many other businesses, don’t want their phone number to be that visible. It’s much cheaper to handle standard issues other ways, like AI-powered chat.
So, when you need to call, you haven’t called them often, and you Google their number. Who is going to win, an airline that makes their phone number hard-to-find, or a scammer buying Google AdWords?
On this, Google and the airline lose. Twitter will be the same story soon: airline support will be there, but it won’t be the airline. They’ll probably have a blue check too.
I read on another website that Singapore Airlines has changed its US phone number; since that change, the old number has been taken over by scammers who are trying to get money out of the unsuspecting people who are still finding the old number on travel websites. A lot of people are used to the “olden days” way of doing things, when companies would keep the same number forever because the only way of finding them was to use a hard copy phone directory. Nowadays, always check with the company’s website, though they don’t always make it easy!
And then Google gets mad when people start using AD blockers on their site.
I am still trying to get my money back but Chase Visa believed the asshole at Fly Vault because he sent false information to back his false charge of $1411.20 that he charged my card by pretending to be a Delta Airlines employee and saying that Cheapo Wings never issued my tickets. AMEX is a better company. When my Mom got scammed, they paid her right back, but I am still fighting Chae Visa. I have been one of Chase’s BEST customers, and they believe Arpit Grover and Fly Vault Deals and said they are legit travel agency. They are doing illegal things and using their registration as a travel agency to commit wire fraud and theft. I am a lawyer, and they had the nerve to say this was not fraud because I gave them my credit card. I did that because they posed as Delta employees who told me my tickets were not paid for on April 16 when I bought them from Cheapo Wings. They accessed my tickets because they were a travel agency who exploited the access that Delta gave them. The Delta representative I called in September told me the July charges never went to them.