Frequent Flier Lands in a $12,000 Scam

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[00:00:01] Bob: This week on The Perfect Scam.

[00:00:04] David Calder: He says uh, we're going to have to charge you, we have to cancel this ticket. We're going to have to charge you for a new ticket and we're giving you first class seats, but of course that's going to be more money, but you're going to be refunded the money." And he sent to me the confirmation. It comes with a Lufthansa letterhead logo on it. The next thing you know, I checked my credit card, right, and surprise there's a billing there for flights that I didn't purchase.

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[00:00:42] Bob: Welcome back to The Perfect Scam. I'm your host, Bob Sullivan.

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[00:00:47] Bob: We are just working our way through the busy summer travel season. I sure hope you've been able to get away for a while, and I think we all know that travelers are particularly vulnerable to scams. When you're traveling, you're often in a strange place under time pressure, distracted. So many elements criminals try hard to artificially create with a story about a grandchild in jail or an arrest permit, well traveling often takes care of the backstory for them. For example, if bad weather causes a flight cancellation and you've got a connection to make, often you've got to make some quick calls to make sure a small hiccup doesn't turn into a big delay. David Calder, who lives near Baltimore, faced just that kind of dilemma last year when he got notice his trip to Budapest would have to be rebooked. And then much faster than you can fly across the Atlantic Ocean, David had more than $12,000 stolen from him. Here's how and what you need to know to protect yourself. The first thing to know about David is, he knows a lot about travel, and he knows a lot about airplanes.

[00:01:55] David Calder: I'm a retired engineer.

[00:01:56] Bob: Oh wow, what kind of stuff did you work on?

[00:01:58] David Calder: Aircraft, aviation, propulsion integration.

[00:02:02] Bob: Whoa, what, for what kind of planes?

[00:02:05] David Calder: Commercial primarily. Some military.

[00:02:08] Bob: Oh, okay. Got it. Wow. Propulsion systems, can you just describe to people just so we have a sense of what is that? What does that mean? What does that word mean?

[00:02:17] David Calder: Oh, that would be the engine, the nacelle and thrust reverser. The company I worked for designed, produced, certified thrust reversers, and some ancillary equipment around the engine, the engine buildup. So...

[00:02:31] Bob: So is a thrust reverser, as a lay person, can I say that's the brakes?

[00:02:35] David Calder: Yeah. When you land, if you look out the window and you see part of a, what people refer to as the engine, but it's really the nacelle housing, engine is in it, part of it moved backwards and there's a big rush of air, that's a thrust reverser.

[00:02:51] Bob: It's pretty important that the brakes work on an airplane, right?

[00:02:54] David Calder: Uh, yeah. Or you have a really long runway. Both are viable solutions.

[00:03:04] Bob: You probably won't be surprised to hear that David traveled a lot. He's been to 30 countries.

[00:03:11] Bob: So you must like flying.

[00:03:13] David Calder: Oh yeah.

[00:03:14] Bob: How many days a year are you traveling do you think for fun?

[00:03:19] David Calder: Right now with the personal commitments with family and so on, so we probably get, I don't know, three or four weeks a year, not nearly enough.

[00:03:31] Bob: Not yet, anyway. Where was your last trip?

[00:03:34] David Calder: Uh, let's see. Last trip was Finland.

[00:03:38] Bob: Oh wow. Did you go this time of year? Like or in winter?

[00:03:41] David Calder: Went in March. We stayed right at the Arctic Circle, went, went up to...

[00:03:46] Bob: So you saw the Northern Lights, right?

[00:03:47] David Calder: Yeah, that was, that was a big part of it, at least for me.

[00:03:52] Bob: Yeah.

[00:03:52] David Calder: The great time to see the Northern Lights and where we stayed there is a, a Santa Village, and it's quite a big deal. And my wife got to see Santa, so that was great.

[00:04:05] Bob: And so, David is a very experienced traveler. He knows his way around airline websites and so on, but in some ways, his experience was used against him last year when he got notice from Lufthansa that there was a glitch in his upcoming travel plan. He and his wife were headed to Budapest soon when...

[00:04:25] David Calder: We received an email from Lufthansa that said there's been a change in their scheduling. I would not be able to make the connecting flight, and we would have to change our flight. So the, the email from them, it was legit, had a link to change my reservations.

[00:04:45] Bob: But apparently a lot of these emails went out at the same time because try as he might, David can't get the link to work.

[00:04:53] David Calder: So over, over a day or more of trying it and having no luck, it was either a dead link or just went into an endless loop or whatever. And I couldn't do anything. And when I went into my Lufthansa account, I couldn't get anywhere with it either.

[00:05:13] Bob: And now, David can feel the clock ticking.

[00:05:17] David Calder: Right, right. Obviously, I was a little bit panicky knowing that we were getting very close to departure and that I had been reading, that booking to Europe throughout summer had been, airlines been overbooked, operating at capacity and so on. I didn't want to get pumped out of the trip, or have it turn into a two or three flight journey to Budapest.

[00:05:43] Bob: So this is the summer of last year, right, and there are all these stories about flights, there being no seats, and you're thinking maybe I'll lose two or three days, or maybe we'll lose the whole trip, right?

[00:05:54] David Calder: Right, right. I, we had a problem like that in Paris about 10 years ago. We lost two days of the trip. Very frustrating.

[00:06:04] Bob: Yeah, that's awful actually. Yeah.

[00:06:05] David Calder: It was all around because an airlines issue and we didn't want to repeat...

[00:06:10] Bob: Sure, you end up having to like wildly overpay for a hotel where you're stuck or something, right? I mean it's a nightmare. I hate that.

[00:06:17] Bob: So David did what probably any of us would do, he went to the internet to see if there was an easier way to reach his airline.

[00:06:25] David Calder: I googled Lufthansa as they say, search engine "Lufthansa Customer Service." It comes up Lufthansa Customer Service. Got a little stork logo there and a phone number, so I called.

[00:06:39] Bob: So you call and actually you get a human being, right?

[00:06:41] David Calder: Yep.

[00:06:42] Bob: So that's refreshing. Finally I'm going to get somewhere, right?

[00:06:45] David Calder: Right, right.

[00:06:46] Bob: Alright, so this person's name was Ethan, do I have that right?

[00:06:48] David Calder: That's correct. It was Ethan.

[00:06:16] Bob: Okay, so what does Ethan tell you?

[00:06:52] David Calder: Well Ethan answered the phone as "Lufthansa Customer Service."

[00:06:56] Bob: Finally, Ethan at Lufthansa Customer Service is ready to help.

[00:07:01] David Calder: Well Ethan says that yes, it's overbooked. We're going to rearrange the flight, blah-blah, yeah, because he had asked for my reservation code. So we go through the whole drill. He's got me on a new flight. He says the only thing that is available is Philadelphia to Toronto, then Toronto to Budapest. We typically fly out of Philly on international flights, BWI very limited in that regard. Okay, I guess I could get with that.

[00:07:31] Bob: The rebooking is as David feared, very complicated.

[00:07:37] David Calder: He says, uh, "We're going to have to charge you. We'll have to cancel this ticket, we're going to have to charge you for a new ticket and we're giving you first class seats, but of course that's going to be more money, but you're going to be refunded the money." "Okay." So with a pair of first-class seats, well granted, I swallowed hard, but he kept saying, "We're going to refund you the money. Lufthansa will refund the money. This is our error." So I thought, well 12 grand, yeah, that's probably about right for a pair of last-minute first-class seats, LA to Toronto to Frankfurt. That stuff doesn't come cheap. So I said, okay, and he sent to me the confirmation. It comes with a Lufthansa letterhead logo on it. I did ask him repeatedly, I'm going to get a refund. "Yep, yep, it's fully refundable. Here's the email. See, it says going to be refunded."

[00:08:37] Bob: It's a bit annoying being routed through Canada, but the first-class seats kind of make up for that, and anyway, David is all set for his trip. But the peace of mind doesn't last long.

[00:08:50] David Calder: The next thing you know, I checked my credit card, right, and surprise there's a billing there for flights that I didn't purchase. It was on Southwest.

[00:09:04] Bob: There's a charge for flights on Southwest?

[00:09:08] David Calder: I knew that was, at that point it was a problem. I contacted fraud dispute immediately on that. I spoke to my card company and I said, "I believe I have been scammed." So filed that dispute online with the card company.

[00:09:25] Bob: So let me, just to be clear here, so when you look at your credit card statement, it, there is also a $12,000 charge for the Budapest flight, is that right?

[00:09:33] David Calder: Yeah, there was $12,137 for the revised flight.

[00:09:38] Bob: The phone number he called, the number Ethan answered, David now suspects it wasn't really Airline Customer Service. Whatever number the search engine gave him was wrong. And he quickly confirms that.

[00:09:51] David Calder: Meantime I, I was calling uh, the, the bogus numbers, and uh, discovered just how bad the situation was. And they answered the phone as Lufthansa when I called one of the numbers. It was amazing. Absolutely amazing.

[00:10:06] Bob: Wow.

[00:10:07] Bob: David's bank quickly honors the dispute for the Southwest Airlines tickets he didn't buy, but the $12,000 charge, that's more complicated.

[00:10:18] Bob: Yeah, and so when you hang up with them, where do things stand on the $12,000?

[00:10:21] David Calder: Well that's a different kind of dispute.

[00:10:24] Bob: A different type of dispute? Was the charge authorized or not? The bank says it has to investigate, but meanwhile, David has another problem. What about his vacation?

[00:10:37] Bob: You still have this problem of getting to Budapest, right? How do you fix that?

[00:10:40] David Calder: Okay, so I get on my Lufthansa account, and I see the bizarre flight through Toronto into Frankfurt, so I dig around. I finally find the Lufthansa number. I spoke to them and life was a lot simpler. It was clear I had missed a red flag or two when I was on the phone with fake Lufthansa. But they rearranged my flight at absolutely no charge, never needed my credit card. Basically all they did was bump my connecting flight from Frankfurt to Budapest by an hour. They shifted my wife and I onto like the next available flight.

[00:11:25] Bob: A, a later flight.

[00:11:26] David Calder: Instead of a two-hour layover, I think we had a three-hour layover, something like that. And that was it.

[00:11:32] Bob: Oh my God. So all this happened because you needed to move a flight an hour.

[00:11:36] David Calder: Yes, yeah, yeah. So...

[00:11:39] Bob: Oh my God, that's terrible, wow.

[00:11:42] Bob: So David and his wife head to Europe to have a good time, but all the while this disputed $12,000 is hanging in the air.

[00:11:53] Bob: That seems really stressful to me. That would put a bit of a gray cloud on my vacation if it were me.

[00:11:57] David Calder: Yeah, I mean it, it was always there in the back of my mind. It was frustrating. Agitating, but suck it up and get on with life and the adventure. It's a hard lesson learned.

[00:12:08] Bob: When they come back home from the trip, there's weeks of back and forth with the bank and with investigators. It becomes clear what happened when David searched online for help finding customer service. He landed on a service that does rebook flights, but at a very high price while pretending to be Airline Customer Service, but that service also shares information with criminals who book bogus tickets. In this case, those bogus tickets were purchased by a business with an Iowa address.

[00:12:40] David Calder: They operate as a quasi-legitimate business, so it's possible you can make a reservation with them and it's legit, it'll work. They're no bargain, but it's legit. They'll get you the airfare, the hotel, and so on, but on the other hand, that's only about half the time. The other half the time they're running a scam. But it's all one criminal network.

[00:13:10] Bob: But unfortunately, David's bank decides that because he did agree to the first-class ticket purchase, he's not entitled to a refund on that charge.

[00:13:20] Bob: How did they communicate that message?

[00:13:21] David Calder: (laughs) Not well, yeah, nobody calls, and here's another lesson learned for the listeners. Nobody calls up and says, golly gee, Mr. Calder. We feel really bad for you, and so on. But this is what, here-, here's the answer and this is why, and we wish you luck in the future. There is nothing like that. There's no shred of empathy or anything. You get an email that says that there's a letter for you in your Citi account. You open your Citi account, it says something to the effect of after a thorough investigation, you authorized the charge, you owe the money. The dispute is closed.

[00:13:53] Bob: Ouch. Oh my gosh, what does that feel like?

[00:13:56] David Calder: You know, I had resigned myself to the pain of losing 12 grand, but yeah, so it didn't feel good. It just fuels the anger and all of that.

[00:14:05] Bob: Of course.

[00:14:06] David Calder: The further I went along in this thing and the angrier I became.

[00:14:13] Bob: David asks for a reinvestigation. The bank agrees and eventually comes to the same conclusion. This cycle happens a couple of times.

[00:14:22] David Calder: Oh yeah, so it goes on and off, on and off. So what happens is when you o--, when you open the dispute, they credit the amount on your credit card statement, right? So now I've got a $12,000 credit. So when they decide that it's my responsibility, it clicks back on the account. And then you contact them and say, oh no, no, no, no. We need to talk. Once they open the dispute, you'll get a, an email and they will credit your account for that amount. My, my credit card balance, my frequent flyer miles kept going up and down there for months and months.

[00:15:02] Bob: Meanwhile, David tried several times to reach Ethan, or whoever he initially talked to.

[00:15:08] David Calder: Yeah, I made a number of calls there early on. I don't know probably more for my own satisfaction. And honestly, I was pretty well resigned to, I'm not going to get anything here. I don't know, I felt like maybe I'd like to know who these people are, and what's going on.

[00:15:28] Bob: So when you called these people and you say, "You guys stole my money," what do they say to you?

[00:15:31] David Calder: You've got to talk to the uh, finance department, you have to speak to some customer service. They put you on hold, and you just walk away from the cellphone. An hour and a half later it's still playing the music. I mean you know the drill.

[00:15:46] Bob: Yeah.

[00:15:46] David Calder: Right? The finance department was great. Okay, well put me through, I'd like to speak to them. Well you can't speak to them. Well how's this work? They have to call you. Okay, well you tell them to call me. How do I get in touch with them? Send us a letter.

[00:16:01] Bob: In the meantime, David goes to the police.

[00:16:06] David Calder: So what I had done, I called the police department in Iowa, and the officer there, he was great, very helpful. He says, "Well I, I'd love to help you, check the place out, but you need to file a complaint with your local police department and then we'll have that information transferred out here, and I can do something with it. That's our police. I said, "Okay. That's fair enough," right, rather accept a random phone call from some person a thousand miles away.

[00:16:41] Bob: Local police issue a subpoena and obtain some business records which lead to a PO Box in Iowa.

[00:16:49] Bob: Did that do any good?

[00:16:50] David Calder: Well that went out there and then we finally got the information and she did the report. She couldn't do anything but read the report to send out to the, the police department there in Iowa, and the officer there was great. And they went out and hit the spot and the address that was posted, it turns out it was a rented mailbox. They never met the person who rented it. No one's ever picked up any mail from it, on and on. They said they checked records and they interviewed numerous employees. They put some time in it. They, they were sincere and I guess wanted to get some perps, but that answered the question and that was pretty much the end of that from a police standpoint. It was only later that it, what I'd said earlier, only later that I discovered that this was a pretty standard thing. A lot of these scammers use PO Boxes as frauds, or fraudulent business. It's a routine thing.

[00:17:45] Bob: All that legwork does get the PO Box shutdown, and it does knock the bogus booking site off the internet, so that's small satisfaction for David.

[00:17:56] Bob: Congratulations. That's no small thing.

[00:17:57] David Calder: Yeah, it's squeezing a balloon.

[00:17:59] Bob: Right, right, right.

[00:18:01] David Calder: The same criminals are, I don't know, do an internet search for travel agencies, whatever. I'm sure you can find some bogus ones in there. It may be the same guy.

[00:18:11] Bob: And none of that changes the bank's ruling.

[00:18:15] Bob: But you are out $12,000.

[00:18:18] David Calder: Right.

[00:18:18] Bob: My God. After, after all of this, it's amazing to me. That, that must be infuriating.

[00:18:23] David Calder: Well it is, it is. So the answer is, I just paid a big price for a hard lesson. My wife and I are not going to have Spam for Thanksgiving. We'll be okay. We'll get passed it. We'll keep try--, life will go on, right. We can absorb the loss. But it's still enormously frustrating.

[00:18:41] Bob: A city spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal, which first spotted David's story, that the bank doesn't discuss individual cases. In a statement, the bank said it's "committed to supporting and protecting our consumers and evaluate all disputes in accordance with established regulations and fraud protection protocols considering the unique circumstances of each transaction." David is, you can probably tell, not one to give up easily, so he keeps reaching out to anyone he can find who might be connected to this.

[00:19:13] David Calder: But it's still enormously frustrating, 12,000. It opened my eyes, all of this, all of the investigating that I did as well as what the Iowa police did and so on, opened my eyes to the scale and magnitude of these scams. The credit card processing company that handled this transaction, they seemed a little iffy. They said that they vet both their customers. When I pressed them, they said, well, we don't know. This one slipped through the cracks. Maybe it happens sometimes. We don't do business with them now. Why not? I don't know. Yeah, okay.

[00:19:56] Bob: I mean there's so many things about this that I agree, is mindboggling, but just well to begin with, all you needed was to bump your flight an hour later, and you end up in the middle of this morass. Oh my God.

[00:20:07] David Calder: Right. A lot of the morass was my own making because I kept pressing on this, right. Yeah. It's, I couldn't let it go. I could not let it go.

[00:20:19] Bob: Well, $12,000 is real money, I don't care who you are.

[00:20:22] David Calder: Well, absolutely.

[00:20:23] Bob: Yeah, I mean, that's a really nice trip, right?

[00:20:26] David Calder: It's another trip to Europe.

[00:20:28] Bob: Okay, so people who are listening to this story, what do you want them to remember? What do you want them to learn from this?

[00:20:33] David Calder: First and foremost, be 110% certain when you speak to Airline Customer Service, that you're speaking to Airline Customer Service. And sometimes it's really challenging to get to that. Like I said, you go to the Lufthansa page, well that wasn't easy to get to the number. It's not a bug, it's a feature. They want everything automated in this day and age, right?

[00:20:57] Bob: A Lufthansa spokesman told the Wall Street Journal, the airline takes the protection of its customers seriously, and actively warns about fraud, including third-party contact pages. It reminds customers to verify the authenticity of any communication, and to use only official Lufthansa channels for bookings and question.

[00:21:16] David Calder: Know before you go, be sure, be certain, absolutely certain you are dealing with and getting what you expect. If there's the slightest hesitation in what they're telling you or asking of you when you're speaking to this customer service problem, hang up.

[00:21:41] Bob: Be absolutely certain who you're dealing with. That's always good advice, but as I said at the beginning of this episode, when you're traveling, when you're a tourist, it's hard to be prepared for everything. So to help you with that, to help you avoid travel scams, we have a special guest here today. He's Chris Elliott, a journalist and consumer advocate who runs Elliott Confidential, a newsletter devoted to helping people avoid ripoffs and scams when they travel. A lot of scams happen when travelers are looking for help in an emergency, and they end up dialing the wrong number.

[00:22:17] Bob: How common is a problem like that?

[00:22:19] Christopher Elliott: I get one like this every week. I get a case from someone who googled what they thought was the phone number for an airline and got through to one of these scammers.

[00:22:31] Bob: There's a couple of ways these kinds of exchanges begin. I think one is, you're at the airport, your flight gets canceled. There's a huge line at customer service. You panic, so you start trying to find your own way around and you call a number from google that you, that turns out to be a crime. But there are other situations where the criminals reach out to people with plane tickets and say your ticket has been canceled or something like that. Is that right?

[00:22:55] David Calder: Yeah, I mean it can happen in any number of ways. We've had situations in the past where one of the popular booking sites will have its, some of its records compromised, so there'll be like a data breach. Live reservation information will get out there onto the Dark Web, and so you'll have people reaching out with very real looking emails and reservation numbers and then a link at the bottom saying, contact us so that we can get this fixed, and it'll take you to a scammer. So we've had that and...

[00:23:28] Bob: That sounds really persuasive.

[00:23:30] Christopher Elliott: Well yeah, because they're using AI now. And AI can make the emails look like they are coming directly from the company. You wouldn't know it unless you go to the actual meta data or go to the top of the email and look at who the sender is. The sender, if it's not coming directly from the company, then it's a scam. And yeah, it's really troubling.

[00:23:55] Bob: And they're using the latest technology to do all this, right?

[00:23:57] Christopher Elliott: They are not afraid to use AI. They have no problem doing that. While the rest of us are struggling with, is it correct to use AI, these guys are early adopters and they're, they are using it really; it should be illegal what they're doing, of course, but the AI should stop them, but they're not, but, but they're using it in a way that it's obviously not designed for.

[00:24:22] Bob: Okay, there's so many questions I have about this. For starters, Bob Sullivan Airline has changed my ticket. I google Bob Sullivan Airlines. How does a scammers phone number come up?

[00:24:32] Christopher Elliott: I have to, I have to back up just a little bit.

[00:24:35] Bob: Oh sure.

[00:24:35] Christopher Elliott: I know that you've covered this before. The search engines, despite their claims to the contrary, are fairly easy to manipulate. Like you can get to the top of a search engine by using all kinds of Grey Hat and Black Hat strategies to get the number one ranking. And they're not going to get the number one ranking for an airline, like if you type in American Airlines, you're going to get the American Airlines website, but if you type in the search term "how to talk to a real person at American Airlines," well that's a little bit easier for a, a kind of a Black Hat or a, a scammer to get to the top of the search engines for. And they do that with a variety of techniques, which, I mean, I don't want to talk about here, but they also sometimes will just buy an ad, a Google Ad. I mean that's, it's really hard to monitor that kind of thing because sometimes they'll use really harmless keywords. Get customer service help fast or something like that. But for whatever reason, people will do a search, and they'll see the search result and the top search result will be a scammer.

[00:25:45] Bob: But it sounds like the top line message here is, you can't necessarily trust the phone number you get off Google.

[00:25:52] Christopher Elliott: Yes. That is. And I have to say, as you probably know, I run a website that lists the names, numbers, email addresses for all the executives, and so I deal with these scammers every day. They try to get me to take the real phone number down and put their phone number up.

[00:26:11] Bob: The scammers reach out to you to scam you.

[00:26:14] Christopher Elliott: Yes.

[00:26:15] Bob: And your anti-scam list.

[00:26:16] Christopher Elliott: Exactly.

[00:26:17] Bob: Great.

[00:26:18] Christopher Elliott: I know. Ironic, right?

[00:26:20] Bob: Yeah, and I mean, are they persuasive?

[00:26:23] Christopher Elliott: Sometimes they get very close. And so here's how they do it. They will give me like an, an 800 number, or an 877 or 866 or something like that, and it will look like the real number. And so we actually, when we get a, when we get a email that says, "You have the wrong phone number for this airline." We will call them and we'll call the phone number. And the tell-tale sign that it's not the correct phone number is, so if you're calling an airline, you will get, it picks up and it says, "Welcome to X airline. If you want to make a reservation press 1." So you get their phone tree, right? If you get through to a scammer, a real person is answering on usually the 1st or 2nd ring.

[00:27:08] Bob: The scammers have great customer service. That's the trick.

[00:27:10] Christopher Elliott: Oh, they do, yes, they do. And, and then you hang up and the scammers will call you back. So, so one strategy really to find out if you've got the right phone number is, first of all, does it pick up and offer a phone tree? If not, it's probably a scam, but if someone picks up almost immediately, hang up. And if they call back, it's a scam. I've had scammers actually call me back several times because they really want my business. They want to scam me.

[00:27:40] Bob: Sure, sure.

[00:27:42] Christopher Elliott: And um, so they're, it, that's the, they're just two tell-tale signs right there.

[00:27:47] Bob: That's crazy that they're trying to scam you.

[00:27:49] Christopher Elliott: We vet our site, we vet all of our, all the information on our website, but you just never know what you're going to find. That's one of the reasons that we're doing what we're doing is because we want to have a trustworthy place where people can get all the information that they are looking for. I mean there's people need vetted information because AI is not vetting the information for you. And they're, the companies are trying to keep all that information from becoming public. I never in a million years thought that I would be doing something like this. I mean I went to journalism school. I didn't think I was going to be running a directory of customer service executives, but that's really what people need. They need a place where they can find a manager or a supervisor who can actually help them and now when you have like companies hiding behind these phone trees and AI, it's more important than ever.

[00:28:46] Bob: Do you have a couple of other examples at hand of how AI has been used in travel scams?

[00:28:51] Christopher Elliott: Look, I deal with this every day, and sure, so one of the other ways that they do that is they create websites that look absolutely real. You see this a lot with hotels is they will create a hotel website that it has the logo on it, it has the right colors, but it is not a hotel website, and when you do a reservation, I mean even, they go to the trouble of creating a website that actually takes reservations too, but when you, and you actually will, are able to do a booking, but then they will charge you a ridiculous fee. I've seen like hundreds of dollars’ worth of fees just to process the reservation. And the problem is that when you go back to your credit card, it says look, you clicked the button, and you should have read it. It said here, "We're going to charge you $100 for this reservation." And there's nothing we can do. We can't, you can't dispute this, so...

[00:29:47] Bob: And, and it's an actual, there is a reservation, it's not as if it was a full-on, you got nothing for your money, right? Yeah.

[00:29:53] Christopher Elliott: No, it's, exactly. I mean that, that's really kind of a gray area too, but I've seen that, and that's been going on for a while now where there are these like hotel sites that look like the real hotels, and they also, we were talking about getting to the top of a Google search result. They're at the very top of the Google search result because the hotel itself maybe didn't care about Google or didn't pay attention and so they're take--, they're just kind of siphoning off all of these reservations and then taking a $100 fee.

[00:30:25] Bob: So that came up with the airline ticket too, and I wanted to make sure I asked you about that, although it's the same principle that you're describing here. It seems strange to me that a person on the other end of the computer could book a ticket for me, charge double the actual ticket price or whatever but still manage to book the ticket for me. Are they registered travel agents or something? How are they able to really book these tickets?

 [00:30:48] Christopher Elliott: You know I'm not a travel agent, so I don't know about the mechanics of it, but it is, it's fairly easy to get set up and to start taking reservations, and so the, the sense is that they're taking advantage of that, and then when questions start getting asked, they move on and just reincorporate and start using a different booking platform maybe.

[00:31:08] Bob: But with the right information, another person can book a plane ticket for you, right?

[00:31:12] Christopher Elliott: Oh, yeah, you don't have to be a travel agent to do that. All you need is a reservation number and you can go to the airline website or hotel website, log in as someone else. If I had your record locator and your last name, I could go onto a, an airline website and make a change to your reservation.

[00:31:32] Bob: And then charge me for it.

[00:31:33] Christopher Elliott: I could charge you whatever I want to, yeah.

[00:31:36] Bob: That's, wow. And that's, that's what happens in these cases. Wow.

[00:31:40] Christopher Elliott: Yeah.

[00:31:42] Bob: Well what are consumers supposed to do to avoid these, being a victim of this kind of crime, particularly given how fragile sometimes your situation is. It's one thing to be sitting at home thinking carefully about this. It's another thing to be at an airport on your phone in a foreign country. So how do you protect yourself?

[00:31:58] Christopher Elliott: Well there's two ways. First of all, you can work with a travel advisor that you know and trust. Your advisor is someone you can call, and if you've got an issue, they'll fix it for you, so you don't have to worry about going out there and finding a phone number for the airline or the hotel. And if you're even slightly uncomfortable using the internet to make a reservation, a travel advisor is your best bet. If you are more of a DIY person and you want to make your own reservations or like the flexibility of being able to just look at the fares, the important thing is, I think you really want to stay off the phone to avoid a scam like this, because most of the scammers are operating on, because they know people want to get through to someone immediately and a phone is the fastest way of doing that, that's how they get you. So if you can do your reservations online and I want to be really specific about this; I don't mean like follow a link that someone emails you. That's wrong. Don't do that. I mean like go to the airline's website and use the site to change your reservation or to check on your reservation. Don't follow any links that someone emails you, because that's how they get you too. But yeah, definitely use the websites and keep a record of everything that you're doing. So keep the emails, create a paper trail, and don't, like they say, talk is cheap. You don't want to get into a situation where someone promises you something on the phone and then it never shows up and no one will have a record of it.

[00:33:40] Bob: I think that's really interesting. And it's true in travel, maybe not true in some other arenas where a voice phone call is not necessarily the safest way to do things and you're, you're telling me that the safest way is to deliberately type in AmericanAirlines.com, go to the airline website and see it all for yourself. Don't trust somebody you're talking to on the phone, is that right?

[00:34:00] Christopher Elliott: Yep, that's right. Well we're living in an age of voice cloning now and where AI is just, you really can't trust what you hear anymore. So you have to go and do some, you have to do your homework. You've got to go to the, if you've got tickets on American Airlines, go to AA.com. Don't Google how to find customer service at American Airlines, unless it's our site of course.

[00:34:29] Bob: We talk a lot on The Perfect Scam about vulnerability. All of us are vulnerable to certain kinds of attacks based on what's going on in our lives. If we're recently single, we're more vulnerable to a romance scam. If we're looking for a job, we might be the target of an employment scam. But since just about everyone travels, all of us are vulnerable to travel scams. All of us get into situations where we're tourists and have to ask for help often under pressure.

[00:35:00] Bob: What is it about travel that makes it susceptible to scams or confusion, or just consumer frustration, do you think?

[00:35:10] Christopher Elliott: That's a good question. I mean travel is aspirational, so people want to go somewhere, they want to have a life changing experience. They want to do something different, and I think that in doing so, they let their guard down. So when it comes to at least leisure travel, I think people are more trusting than they should be.

[00:35:32] Bob Elliott: Well so much of travel requires some crazy leap of faith, right?

[00:35:35] Christopher Elliott: Yes. It does. You have to trust that the website actually is going to sell you a ticket. The person that you're talking to on the other end of the phone is actually working for the company and is going to do what he or she says. There's a lot of leaps of faith going on in travel for sure.

[00:35:54] Bob: You have to trust the hotel really does have your reservation; they're not going to sell your room to someone else, right?

[00:35:59] Christopher Elliott: Yeah, well that does happen, but yes that, well that your plane ticket that you actually have a plane ticket and that you have a seat on the plane, that you have a hotel room, that you have a rental car, all those things, it's all based on trust and when the trust goes away, that's when people contact me or you.

 [00:36:20] Bob: I read once that some economists like to talk about the tourist vs. local problem. So the tourist is always going to eat at a restaurant that's probably too expensive and doesn't have the best food. The locals know the right one to go to, right? And just in general, tourists are kind of like babes in the wood, and so I think that fresh new experience, which is why we love travel, it's also one reason why people who are traveling are vulnerable, I think.

[00:36:45] Christopher Elliott: Yeah, that's absolutely true.

[00:36:48] Bob: When something goes wrong when you're traveling, and I mean I do think part of what we're talking about here is you do a lot of things when you're traveling you wouldn't normally do. Because you're buying something with foreign currency, or you're, you're, there's bad weather and you need an extra room in a hotel and there's all these situations where you don't have normal bargaining power.

[00:37:10] Bob: On the other hand, thanks to the internet, travelers have the opportunity to be way more prepared than in the past. It's much easier to research modes of transportation from far away, for example, to see what typical taxi rides are supposed to cost. And to get opinions from other travelers.

[00:37:24] Christopher Elliott: I mean, I think people are getting smarter about it. I think you have to be a little bit smarter about it in today's, in, in this day and age. But I don't know if they're smart enough. I think that there still is a lot of, well you'd mentioned trust before, and I think that if, there has to be a good balance between trust and skepticism. And if you don't have that right balance, then you end up becoming a victim.

[00:37:57] Bob: I, I like that a lot. That we, we don't want to create people who are paranoid and, and, you know, won't travel because they're afraid they're getting ripped off, right? We do have to make these many leaps, but can you trust but also be skeptical in the right proportions? That's quite a challenge it sounds to me.

[00:38:11] Christopher Elliott: It is. I mean you're talking to a guy who travels 350 days out of the year, so I'm literally on the road most of the year. And I still get tripped up from time to time. The, the travel industry is filled with very innovative scams.

[00:38:28] Bob: And there's a continuum, right? There's out and out crime, scams, and then there's like hidden fee kind of things, and then there's weather, stuff that's out of anyone's control really, but all of those kinds of things come up as you're traveling. Or you must have a thousand of these leaps of faith that you make in the course of a year and dozens of them that go wrong, right?

[00:38:48] Christopher Elliott: Yes. Forgive the deep thoughts here.

[00:38:51] Bob: Sure.

[00:38:51] Christopher Elliott: But we're having a little bit of a philosophical discussion about travel and why you travel, and I think people go into it with the very best of intentions, especially if it's a vacation. They think everything is going to go just fine, and when someone asks them to wire money, or quotes them a price, they assume that the money is going to get to them and there'll be a room there or they, or a vacation rental or that the price that they are being quoted has, it includes everything. It doesn't, there's no gotcha fee there. And people are genuinely surprised when it doesn't go their way. And I think that, you know, when you were talking about like the innovation that goes into some of these scams, you almost have to be innovative because travelers catch onto the scams after a while and, and the old scams don't work and you have to come up with something new. And what I've experienced is that things are moving much faster. That point between where the scam starts and where people catch on is growing shorter and shorter. And so the pace of innovation is accelerating so that you can actually keep up with that.

[00:40:10] Bob: And most of all, try to be flexible. Travel usually involves adventure, and adventures have surprises, hiccups, delays, bad weather. Staying calm and being flexible in the face of hiccups will go a long way towards keeping your money out of the hands of criminals.

[00:40:27] Bob: But if you had one piece of advice to give people about what should they do when something goes wrong, whether it's a crime or it's just Mother Nature, what's the best thing people can do when something goes wrong while you're traveling?

[00:40:40] Christopher Elliott: Well, don't assume automatically that you've been scammed. It could be something very innocent. You know, I don't want to make everyone paranoid here, but my advice would be to start a paper trail immediately. So if someone is telling you something, they're saying, oh yeah, your room is ready or we have a seat for you here or whatever the claim is, you want to get it in writing because if you do have to file maybe an insurance claim on your travel insurance or if you have to send a complaint to the hotel or to one of the vacation rental platforms, the first thing they're going to ask for is a paper trail. They're going to want to see the text messages between you and the host or the emails between you and the hotel, and if you don't have those then it's going to make it much more difficult for you to get what you want.

[00:41:31] Bob: I think that's really good and important advice. The second that something's gone wrong, and alarm bells are going off are going off, just start writing things down or make sure you have a text message or an email or something. You've got to have this sort of like forensic accountant point of view immediately. Does that help?

[00:41:45] Christopher Elliott: Yeah, or even just pull out your phone and start taking photos. That's true for like rental cars. When someone hands you the keys to a rental car, you immediately start taking photos inside, outside, upside-down, and then afterwards when you return the car, you're also going to want to take photos. And people just don't do that. They take photos of everything else except for, just as an example, your vacation rental; when you arrive and then when you leave. People don't think, oh, I'm going to take photos of it. But so many times you get a claim; you ruined the sofa in my vacation rental. Well, here's a photo of the sofa when I left. It's fine. And people don't know to do that. Maybe it's because they're trusting and they think, oh, nothing is going to go wrong, but better safe than sorry.

[00:42:31] Bob: Sure, and it costs you nothing, right?

[00:42:33] Christopher Elliott: Yeah, also you have a photo of your vacation rental and now you can show it to all your friends -- look, here's where we stayed.

[00:42:41] Bob: Are there new, or vaguely new travel scams that listeners should know about?

[00:42:47] Christopher Elliott: Sometimes I feel like Fox Mulder in the TV show, "The X-Files," where it's trust no one. But we're, things are changing so fast that by the time this podcast gets released, they'll, the scammers are going to be onto a whole new set of scams. It's, I'm having a hard time keeping track of it all. I know you are too. The best advice that I can offer is to just be on your guard always as a consumer and don't trust anything.

[00:43:20] Bob: Don't trust anything. I hate the sound of that, but well we've talked about this before. In cybersecurity, they've taken to calling it a zero-trust environment, and cynical as it sounds, it's the right thing to do. Every email, text, and phone call you get, you should treat it as fake until you can prove it's real.

[00:43:41] Bob: Yeah, I mean I hate what it's done to trust, because it used to be that you could call a company and you could be reasonably assured that you were talking to a representative of a company, and you can't anymore. I used to think that if you got an email, a confirmation from a, an airline or a hotel that that was actually a confirmation, but now, I don't even know what it is anymore. It's, very often it's not what I think it was.

[00:44:09] Bob: Things are very often not what you think they are. Keep that in mind and bon voyage.

[00:44:17] Bob: For The Perfect Scam, I'm Bob Sullivan.

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[00:44:33] Bob: If you have been targeted by a scam or fraud, you're not alone. Call the AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline at 877-908-3360. Their trained fraud specialists can provide you with free support and guidance on what to do next. Our email address at The Perfect Scam is: theperfectscampodcast@aarp.org, and we want to hear from you. If you've been the victim of a scam or you know someone who has, and you'd like us to tell their story, write to us. That address again is: theperfectscampodcast@aarp.org. Thank you to our team of scambusters; Associate Producer, Annalea Embree; Researcher, Becky Dodson; Executive Producer, Julie Getz; and our Audio Engineer and Sound Designer, Julio Gonzalez. Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For AARP's The Perfect Scam, I'm Bob Sullivan.

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