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).
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?