In this day and age, somebody getting scammed over the phone doesn’t usually make headlines, but there’s something unique and troubling about Dan Smoker’s incident with United Airlines.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: a customer called up a company and ended up accidentally sending money to a bad actor.
It isn’t quite a tale as old as time, but it’s certainly been around for as long as telephony customer service has been.
In most cases, the customer uses an internet search to find the company’s contact number and is redirected to a scam line or receives a call directly from the scammer impersonating the company.
However, in this instance, Smoker has proof that he only ever dialed the United Airlines’ official customer service number, so how exactly did he end up losing over $17,000?
A Series of Usual and Unusual Events
As he was about to embark on a European family holiday, Smoker’s flight was cancelled.
Most people will have experienced something similar at some point during their travels. While it is unfortunate and can be very irritating, it is usually a fairly straightforward process.
Smoker contacted the official United Airlines customer service number to try to rebook a flight for himself and his family.
During his three-hour-plus phone call, Smoker was able to rebook the flights and upgrade to premium economy. The service agent confirmed that they would have to charge Smoker for the new tickets, but that he would be able to get a full refund.
Following the call, Smoker received an email confirmation with details of the new flights and the refund.
It all sounds pretty uneventful so far, but this is where things took a turn.
Months later, the refund never appeared.
After checking over his credit card statement, Smoker noticed that the $17,000 charge was listed under AIRLINEFARE, rather than United Airlines.
At this point, he suspected he may have been the victim of a scam and reached out to Consumer Investigator Steve Staeger.
Staegar reviewed Smoker’s call log and confirmed that he had contacted the official United Airlines number, but he did notice several irregularities with the email confirmation.
"When I read that refund email, I spotted red flags almost immediately, like the email didn’t come from a United Airlines email address," he said in an appearance on Denver, Colorado’s 9News.
The format is weird, some numbers with zeros in front of them, dollars always listed in USD, dates with day in front of the month. I figured Dan had been taken advantage of.
But, if Smoker only ever contacted United, how did this happen?
During the call, Smoker recalls being placed on hold by a female agent. When the call returned, it had been passed on to a new male agent named ‘David’.
It looks like this is where the scammer must have made contact, as United later confirmed that although they did have a record of Smoker’s call, it had only been logged on their side for 12 minutes – not the three hours that Smoker’s call log shows.
