There are lots of scammers who try to take advantage of unsuspecting airline passengers. One common scam is that you’ll see phone numbers listed online that claim to be official airline phone numbers, but in reality, they’re just the phone numbers of scammers. So people call those numbers thinking they’re talking to an airline representative,…
Continue reading: Man Calls United Airlines, Gets Scammed For $17K: Here’s How It Happened
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Obviously no business seem to properly train their customer service reps.
It used to be the elite desk that knows what they're doing. Nowadays many are as useless too.
During its dying days near the end, TWA used cheaper inmates to handle calls. Often it would be Black males answering. TWA stopped when some inmates wrote down and smuggled out credit card numbers.
Sometimes the way the conversation develops does have me wondering whats going on. Recently I was on the phone with Qatar airways trying to search flights with points. After having no luck on the obvious options I asked if she could search on partner airlines and she told me she cannot search partner inventory, only Qatar operated flights. I said thank you and hung up. I was floored that for the first time ever I was told such an obvious lie.
Yes. I read news articles just last week regarding the AI component of google search generating scam numbers (or rather, how scammers were able to have google search AI generate fake numbers). Either way, this is on United to make him whole; did that happen?
Although he didn’t pay United, they have admitted liability here so if the card company won’t reverse the fees it’s upto UA to refund him.
What do why clear is if he booked with United, who were they transferring him to ? Clearly you should refer to a businesses website for contact details. It’s also important to understand how he provide payment details.
You must never read out card details to a person or write them down. You should be transferred to an automated system in order to key in the numbers.
I'm really sorry, but this is just one of the many hidden costs and consequences of outsourcing and offshoring labor costs at the absolute rock-bottom cost.
Seems like a lack of training but United agents seem to love transferring you to not do work. Had an itinerary through United with a canceled flight asked to be rebooked on Lufthansa with open seats (United codeshare showing on united.com) the agent transferred me to Lufthansa even when I said no what is Lufthansa’s call center gonna do for a United booking (No Lufthansa initially) and a United cancelled flight. Had to call United again and another agent was able to put me on the Lufthansa flights…
So what's the resolution? Intentional or not, the UA agent transferred the customer to a scammer. So, is UA going to make him whole?
Maybe it wasn't a lie as such. Simply she was telling you she was refusing to help you !
Poor service indeed...
Well well…this spring I spent 3 hours on official online chat of Hotels.com after my reservation has been cancelled by the hotel. Then they asked to call me and I spent 2 more hours waiting for them to fix some error in the reservation system that didnt allow the assistant to change the cancelled reservation.
Then finally they asked me to make a new reservation (in the app) and informed I will get a refund in the amount of the new reservation. In few days I received the refund.
Honestly, if they - after 5+ hours on the line - they asked me to make a new reservation over the phone, I would certainly do it.
Did we really need an investigative reported to tell him he was conned? The moment they said $17,000 and we'll refund you later should have raised huge red flags. And have a look at the confirmation letter. It's got all kinds of different font, bolding, capital letters in the wrong places, incorrect grammar. This one was pretty obvious.
United is at fault, but they're not the ones who took the money, so they have nothing to refund to begin with. A CC dispute should do it, and then the CC can recover from United.
Not mentioned anywhere, here or in real journalism: Why isn't Google being held accountable?
Google makes BILLIONS off of selling search result positioning, as they did in this case. But they can't be bothered to do a background check or even a two-minute sanity check on who is paying them for top positioning - sorry, can't do any sort of checks, they're just too busy stuffing their pockets with ill-gotten money from the criminals, so good luck, suckers! Maybe if they started being held financially culpable for the half-billion dollars that federal agencies say are caused by this very scam every year, they might take some interest in how their business is directly responsible for enabling this and countless other scams.
Of course UA will make him good, if only from a PR stance. Good news, this has just become far less likely to ever happen again. You know the higher ups at all airlines are taking steps to prevent this.
United's explanation of this situation doesn't make sense, the agent dialed the number by mistake and somehow the scammer knew to present themselves as a United Airlines reservation agent? United wants this story to go away and I understand it, this is bad for their brand. However there is no way anyone is buying their explanation that this was all just a big mistake on the part of their reservation agent this was an inside job perpetrated by one of their outsourced call centers.
Hopefully a CC dispute will settle this.
Seems like a call center inside job. Unlikely a call center employee has the need or time to google anything. And don't they record all calls for "quality assurance".
United's call center reps can transfer calls outside the organization?
That seems like an insane security loophole right there.
This does not pass the smell test and I’m shocked that United is passing it around as the answer
Well that sucks, but not entirely unsurprising. Though I'd have thought call agents would have a better way of getting a partner airline's phone number than Googling it, which is what really blows my mind about this case.
This is true. Same thing with YouTube. I report deep fake video ads every single day and they never stop showing up on my screen. Apparently, they don't violate their T&Cs, which is simply another term for "as long as they keep paying, we don't care!"
Thanks for this post. For now it may be an isolated incident, but it has a potential to become more common.
Will be alert in the future.
"Maybe it wasn't a lie as such. Simply she was telling you she was refusing to help you !"...
...by lying.
You just described a lie.
"...United agents seem to love transferring you to not do work."
If you're punished on performance appraisals for your average call time being too long, you might love transferring calls "not to do work" also.
Side note. Please never wait 45-60 days for a credit card refund. IME, if it takes longer than 14 days, then something has almost certainly gone wrong and you need to get them to investigate.
You have a limit on how long you can pursue credit card disputes so you don't want to be too lax on that.
Also regardless of whether you realize its a scam or not, you should never accept someone having $17k of your money for 6 weeks for no good reason.
Sounds like he deserves a refund from United if they’re claiming that’s what happened.
I'm not surprised they can transfer to another *A airline. I /am/ surprised it's not limited to a pre-vetted list.
I should clarify I misspoke. I did not think this one through very well. United should reimburse the traveler directly and then seek refund from their insurance carrier.
The job of United phone agents is to put you on another flight that is showing seats on united.com when your original flight is cancelled (but auto rebooking options in the app are trying to make you wait an extra day). If the agent knows what they’re doing it takes them a very short amt of time when I’ve given them the flight numbers and exactly what to do. If they don’t then mb it takes them longer, get lower performance appraisals, and you want to transfer calls since you don’t know what or how to do it
"how would the other agent know to present as a United agent, in some form?"
Because the agent calls the other airline, introduces him/herself as a United agent, explains the situation, and the scammer, thinking quickly, says "Ah, I see, I am supposed to be a United agent." And the scammer creatively and on-the-fly comes up with all the right things to say to the victim, who, believing he was connected to another United agent, compliantly follows all instructions.
It wouldn't be too surprising if UA agents are allowed to connect to other airlines and discuss a ticket with the passenger. There are often cases where there's an issue with a ticket (one airline controls it and needs to release it to the other, etc) and the only way to get that done is for the agents to talk to each other. And in some cases it may be beneficial for the customer to be on the line to verify information or answer questions.
Of course, in those cases the UA agent stays on the line, which was not the case here. That may have made sense to the agent (the agent's input was no longer required), but maybe the policy needs to change so the UA agent remains on the line throughout the call.
Isn't United liable for the 17K charge. You don't say if they compensated the man.
1.customer support here was poorly trained
2. United needs to tighten down support staff computers. They should be calling other ual #s like an internally dialed #
3. Google, Microsoft, Apple and even firefox and duckduck go needs to be fined because they created this scam mess. If you haven't noticed, even if you search for a specific store like Target for example, the first result is no longer target.com. Instead it's someone else who paid the browser to have their site on top. In fact, most of these search results, what you actually want is on page 2.the first page is just full of bs results. I've gone on some of these scam sights to research their methods (i used to do IT security) some of them are very convincing. It started with Google but now they all do it and they know about it. It's infuriating.
Because Google created this environment for the scammer and they are well aware of it. They allow scammers to buy the top 5 search results even though it has nothing to do with the business. Next time you Google anything take at hard look at the results on that first page. Many many scammers sites are on it.
Google says that they shut down 4k such sites daily but they are the ones who created this paid search results scheme.
Red flag - Amount they need to charge and claim they will refund it. If you are being rebooked because the flight was canceled there is no money needed because you already paid for the flight unless you are upgrading or asking for something extra.
A very similar thing happened to a friend of mine on a recent trip, thank goodness not for that amount, but I was listening to the entire call and didn't pick up on it until it was too late and he got his "confirmation" email...