It’s amazing how big the scam industry is of preying on people who accidentally dial the wrong phone number when trying to reach airline customer service. This latest incident isn’t the first or last time we’ll see something like this, and it’s a good reminder to always make sure you dial the right phone number if something doesn’t sound right to you (thanks to Mike for flagging this).
In this post:
Reddit user has suspicious phone call with “British Airways”
A traveler took to the r/BritishAirways forum on Reddit to share an “absolutely bonkers experience getting shaken down on a free involuntary reroute.”
He had booked a ticket involving travel on American and British Airways, but one of the flights was canceled, so he needed to be rebooked. So he called up what he thought was British Airways’ customer service phone number.
The person who he believed was the customer service agent claimed the only option was to refund the ticket and then rebook, but after pushing back, the person offered to send it off to another department for rebooking, and said she’d call him back.
A short time later, the traveler received a confirmation email from British Airways confirming the flight changes, which even resulted in significantly reduced travel time, going from a two-stop itinerary to a one-stop itinerary.
After he received the confirmation email, the agent he had initially spoken to called him back, saying he’d have to pay $500 per person for a “fare difference,” because he was switching to a better routing.
He pushed back, so she escalated that to a supervisor, who made up all kinds of things. Eventually the supervisor tried to negotiate, claiming he could use a “supervisor coupon,” to lower the cost to $350 per person. He even said that if the customer wasn’t happy with that, they could just refund the ticket so he could buy new tickets elsewhere.
When the customer kept emphasizing that this was a violation of the law, the supervisor just suggested he call the main customer service phone number, because they “know more about laws and can probably credit it.”
When he then called the main customer service phone number, they confirmed the ticket had been rebooked, there was no change fee, and everything was fine.
So the customer finished by explaining that he has “already filed a formal internal complaint with BA Customer Relations demanding a QA audit on those recorded lines,” and asks if anyone else has experienced something similar.
What really happened with this phone call to “British Airways”
Just hours after posting this on Reddit, the user provided an update, along with an apology to British Airways. Let me just share this explanation:
First, I want to clarify how I got connected to them: I completely screwed up by transposing two of the digits when typing out the helpline number from my screen. The real BA number in the email was 1-877-767-7970 (of course they put it in the email without any hyphens), but I flipped two numbers and accidentally dialed 1-877-677-7970, landing me right in their trap.
When I spoke to “Leah” on that fake line, she saw that BA’s automated system had placed me on a bad, late flight. She asked to call me back to “reprice the ticket.”
During that 45-minute gap, the scammers literally called the real British Airways line pretending to be me. Because of UK/EU261 rules, the real BA agents changed my booking to the perfect 1-stop itinerary for a grand total of $0.00.
The real BA system automatically generated the confirmation email and sent it directly to my inbox. Seconds later, the scammer called me back from a spoofed Texas VoIP line (737-587-3217). She pointed to the official BA email I had just received as “proof” of her work, took credit for the change, and then demanded the fake $500 fee.
These people are sophisticated middlemen. They are squatting on numbers hoping you flip a digit. Once you do, they will actively impersonate you to the airline, get your flight fixed for free by exploiting consumer protection laws, and then turn around and try to charge you a massive premium for it. Be incredibly careful when dialing your keypads!
This is an incredibly common scam, and clearly this industry only exists because of how common it is for people to dial the wrong number. This seems to work in one of two ways — either people just accidentally reverse a couple of digits, or scammers try to rank on search engines for airline customer service phone numbers, by hoping people find their numbers rather than the real numbers.
Last year I wrote about how a man called United Airlines to change flights, and got scammed out of $17,000. I then followed that up with a post about how this fake airline phone number scam works.
Bottom line
A British Airways customer had a schedule change on a flight, so tried to call up British Airways to change the flight. He accidentally dialed the wrong number, though, and ended up connected to scammers.
They did in fact change the flights for him, seemingly by calling British Airways on his behalf. However, they also then requested a $500 per person change fee, claiming that this was the cost of the change due to the more convenient routing.
The customer pushed back and found this to all be suspicious, and ultimately learned about his mistake. Again, it’s amazing how common this is, so don’t let it happen to you. Always get airline phone numbers directly from airline websites, carefully check the numbers you dial, and if something doesn’t sound right, hang up and call (the right number) again.
What do you make of this British Airways scam incident?
Interesting they helped and made the change before asking for money.
Usually they ask for money first, then go do the work.
Thats how Air Canada scammers work anyway, since it's impossible to get through to the real call center.
Never google a company number. Always go directly to the website. The customer then gave all their details to a third party. If you call an airline there is always an announcement message saying who they are, a list of options etc. many people don’t listen, when the call is answered they ask “ is that BA” ? As The scammers are dealing with every airline and more.
Why are we still blaming consumers for Googling a phone number instead of asking why Google sells the top search result to an impersonator?
Scammers only succeed here because major search networks take ad dollars from fraud rings to display deceptive customer service links. If a platform profits from serving a fake number, it's the platform’s responsibility to vet its ads; not the customer’s fault for trusting the result.
The Customer Service numbers are no longer easy to find on any airlines website. This plays right into the hands of the scammers.
They are quite simple to find. I had an issue with BA over the weekend, which was resolved
Icarus, I see you've gone with, 1:07PM "it's easy!"... 1:11PM "people are careless!"... 1:13PM "it's impossible to stop!" You're doing full-time customer relations for British Airways, it seems. I think my favorite so far is your 'it didn't happen to me, so it's not a problem' argument. Psh.
BA and Google need to take responsibility, here. When companies bury support channels and profit off running deceptive ads, that's negligence; and as consumers, we have to...
Icarus, I see you've gone with, 1:07PM "it's easy!"... 1:11PM "people are careless!"... 1:13PM "it's impossible to stop!" You're doing full-time customer relations for British Airways, it seems. I think my favorite so far is your 'it didn't happen to me, so it's not a problem' argument. Psh.
BA and Google need to take responsibility, here. When companies bury support channels and profit off running deceptive ads, that's negligence; and as consumers, we have to demand better than just throwing our hands up. (C'mon man, 'fight for the Users,' not ENCOM.)
My point is that if you go to the BA website, it’s very easy to find the correct number.
BA.com > help >
Lufthansa > help and contact
Etc etc
Unfortunately we live in the world of stupidity, and people often don’t research properly.
On Facebook there are groups “ I hate BA or UA etc” also giving incorrect information, which people trust. Scammers follow people and claim to be able...
My point is that if you go to the BA website, it’s very easy to find the correct number.
BA.com > help >
Lufthansa > help and contact
Etc etc
Unfortunately we live in the world of stupidity, and people often don’t research properly.
On Facebook there are groups “ I hate BA or UA etc” also giving incorrect information, which people trust. Scammers follow people and claim to be able to help.
There are so many fake profiles on FB or instagram offering customer support for different companies. I’ve reported many myself, and META isn’t interested. They are also so obviously fake, and yet as I alluded, people are stupid.
Icarus, ok, so, I see that you've chosen to double-down, basically, repeating... company doesn't care, scammers are everywhere, and people are stupid. *throw hands up* When multi-billion-dollar tech platforms profit off hosting impersonators and refuse to moderate their own sites, that is a structural failure, not a character flaw of everyday people trying to get flight help. We should not be shifting the blame or the burden to the victims.
What's new (to me, anyway) is that they actually delivered the service. There's probably a real market for a service that would *honestly* do these kinds of tasks for you for, say, $50 a pop.
This kind of thing used to happen all the time on the internet too. There would be really sketchy websites with slight misspellings of the websites we typically want to go to
Many years ago, untied.com used to lead to a site critical of United. Sites like that that made the internet a little more fun have been dying out, sadly.
If you call (what you think is) the BA number and get answered within a couple of minutes or less, then you misdialed. Expect a long wait and the repetitive hold music/messages. The clues were there all along.
This. Is there isn't an interminable wait when calling BA, you should be suspicious.
The most scary part is how the scammers got through the real BA line to make the change impersonating to be the passenger. Don't they have several verifications to go through before an agent confirm your identity? How could the scammers get through all of those?
Once you have the PNR you can bring up all the details online and then call in. I’m assuming the first thing the slammer says is “please can I get your booking reference” and then follows with questions asking for all the details that they know BA will ask.
Given how frequent this has become, one wonders if it would be worth it for some of these airlines to buy up some of the phone numbers that often get mistakenly dialed. I can't imagine it costs that much. Then again, they'd have to care about the customer experience...
You'd think so, there's also some folks feeding numbers to spam websites so that Gemini and other AI platforms direct the user to those numbers instead of the legit ones.
Yup, no different than Google taking "gogle.com" and redirecting to "real" Google.
This can be a lifesaver, and it's no different than doing it for airline phone numbers, as you note your awesome suggestion.
Yes, NotThatBen, this is part of the solution. Both the airlines (like BA) and tech platforms (like Google) need to take responsibility for this, rather than pretending they aren't liable for their own negligence by omission.
This happened to my mom - dialing the wrong number for a wheelchair assist.
It is sad, but she paid the fee at first. Then called me, as I had booked her ticket. It took a while (including getting a new credit card number for her) to get things sorted out. I'm just happy the scammers didn't cancel the ticket out of spite, as they had the PNR and name.
The problem is that the scammers are mostly offshore. Offshore in countries in which the "regulators" have zero desire to stop it.
'Offshore' from where, George? The US is technically 'offshore' from the UK, and domestic regulators in both countries are failing consumers by omission every day (especially by letting search engines host sponsored scam ads and telecoms route spoofed numbers.)
Blaming unnamed foreign governments oversimplifies a complex cybercrime pipeline and absolves the ad networks and tech platforms right here at home that profit from hosting these fake numbers in the first place.
'Offshore' from where, George? The US is technically 'offshore' from the UK, and domestic regulators in both countries are failing consumers by omission every day (especially by letting search engines host sponsored scam ads and telecoms route spoofed numbers.)
Blaming unnamed foreign governments oversimplifies a complex cybercrime pipeline and absolves the ad networks and tech platforms right here at home that profit from hosting these fake numbers in the first place.
The same countries taking good paying American tech jobs from the workers you so claim to care about.
George, if you're actually concerned about workers (here, there, or anywhere else) you should be looking at the corporate executives and shareholders who profit from offshoring those jobs to cut labor costs. Blaming foreign workers for corporate outsourcing is a false choice. Blame the management decisions that actually drive it, not the people 'taking the jobs.' C'mon man, stop carrying water for these multi-billion-dollar corporations on here all day.
Regulators need to start cleaning out these numbers. Mistyped phone numbers *will* happen; it should really be possible to force scammers off of them.
Yes! Gray gets it. Regulators should be empowered to protect consumers here. If Ben, Jeremy, Howie, will let me use '1990' as a 'Member' I'd 'Helpful' your comment. For now, please enjoy this poor-man's 'Helpful'... *click*
It’s almost impossible as soon as one is removed, another 10 appear. Based offshore. So you call a US number and end up speaking to someone in Bengaluru.
Icarus, 'almost' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible—and the airlines, search engines, and telecom platforms facilitating these fake numbers have a responsibility to curb impersonation fraud on their systems.
Saying it's impossible just gives those massive corporations a free pass to ignore the harm being caused. The technology exists to verify numbers and ad placements; they just need to be held accountable for implementing it. Let's not...
Icarus, 'almost' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible—and the airlines, search engines, and telecom platforms facilitating these fake numbers have a responsibility to curb impersonation fraud on their systems.
Saying it's impossible just gives those massive corporations a free pass to ignore the harm being caused. The technology exists to verify numbers and ad placements; they just need to be held accountable for implementing it. Let's not resort to defeatism here.
Just a skill issue. Don't dial wrong numbers
It’s not merely a dialing mistake, Julie. Scammers buy paid search ads that impersonate official corporate numbers. Unfortunately, you're just blaming the victim. BA (and Google) can take more responsibility here to ensure that the top numbers are theirs/legit, not a scammers.
That has nothing to do with this case.
This person called an incorrect number because they pressed buttons the wrong order.
Julie, moving goal-posts again, I see. No, mere misdialing one digit is a basic human typo. Building a fake airline call center on that exact misdialed number to trick consumers is fraud. Blaming the caller for a typo completely ignores the scam engineered around it.
You're the one moving the goalposts. This situation had nothing to do with "scammers buying paid search ads".
Did you read the article?
Julie, oh, I certainly did read it, thoroughly; and, I know that you know better, because typosquatting phone numbers is the actual scam, here. These perpetrators built an entire fraudulent call center on that misdialed number to impersonate British Airways. Pretending an organized crime ring isn't the problem because the victim 'just made a typo' is missing the forest for the trees. Try again. Harder.