The online scam that hits travellers at their most distracted

NEW YORK – When an actual human being answered an airline customer service hotline after a single ring, I probably should have known I was being scammed.

At the time, I wasn’t exactly thinking critically. It was three days before Thanksgiving, and my family was about to miss our flight to Berlin, stuck in traffic en route to the airport in Newark, New Jersey.

So when an empathetic-sounding man identified himself as a United Airlines agent named Sheldon and immediately asked for my phone number in case we got disconnected, I felt nothing but an overwhelming sense of relief. Sheldon told me not to worry. He’d get my family to Berlin. 

“Sheldon, you are an angel,” I said through tears, explaining that my father had died in July and this was to be our family’s first Thanksgiving without him.

Sheldon told me, with what seemed like genuine emotion, that he was terribly sorry for my loss. The good news was he could get us on a Lufthansa flight later that night. All I had to do was cover the price difference between the tickets: US$1,415 (S$1,830) for the three of us. I sighed and gave Sheldon my American Express card number. 

That’s when I became the latest victim of what the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) calls a business-impostor or business-impersonator scam. Like 396,227 other Americans in the first nine months of 2025 – up 18 per cent from the same period in 2024 – I fell for this increasingly sophisticated deception. Reported losses from business-impostor scams in the United States rose 30 per cent, to US$835 million, in the first three quarters of 2025, against US$644 million in the first three quarters of 2024, according to the FTC. 

The specific techniques the scammers use vary: Some pose as airline staff on social media and respond to consumer complaints. Others use texts or e-mails claiming to be an airline reporting a delayed or cancelled flight to phish for travellers’ data. But the objective is always the same: to hit a stressed out, overwhelmed traveller at their most vulnerable.

A sponsored scam

In my case, the scammer exploited weaknesses in Google’s automated ad-screening system, so that fraudulent sponsored results rose to the top. After I reported the fake “United Airlines” ad to Google, via an online form for consumers, it was taken down. But a few days later, I entered the same search terms and the identical ad featuring the same 1-888 number was back at the top of my results. I reported it again, and it was quickly removed again.

“We have zero tolerance for scam ads and take extensive measures to keep them off our platforms,” a Google spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement. “If we identify a scam that temporarily evades our detection, we’ll take quick action to suspend the advertiser’s account, as we’ve done here.”

Part of the problem is the explosion of AI tools, which are “supercharging fraud”, says Mr John Breyault, vice-president of public policy at the National Consumers League. The technology enables scammers to “do what they’ve always done, but in a more efficient way, at a bigger scale and lower cost”.

He says scammers are using large language models to craft ever-more-convincing phishing texts and e-mails; seeding the internet with false customer service numbers that get swept up in artificial intelligence-driven search results; and building fake websites that look indistinguishable from the real thing. And they excel at doing all this at times of peak stress – when it comes to airline scams, consumers are particularly vulnerable around the holidays.

“Urgency is what the scammers depend on to defraud their victims,” Mr Breyault says. “Nothing feels more urgent than sitting in an airport figuring out what to do so you can be with your family for the holidays.”

When I reached out to United to find out what the airline was doing to combat impostor scams, a spokesperson e-mailed this statement: “United works diligently to protect our customers from scams and actively investigate areas of potential fraud. We encourage customers to only use customer-service contact information that is listed on our website and app.”

The replacement of humans with not-always-helpful AI-powered customer-service tools makes it easier for an airline scammer to lure frustrated travellers. That’s what happened to me in the back of the cab when I opened the United app on my phone and began furiously texting, first with a bot, then with an actual representative, who sent me a link for the company’s Agent on Demand service to help passengers in urgent situations.

The link didn’t work. When I tried to text the agent on the app, the connection got lost and I was back to square one, chatting with a bot. Time was running out. Exasperated, I closed the app and typed “United airlines agent on demand” into Google. The top search result on my phone said United.com, had a 1-888 number next to it and said it had had “1M+ visits in past month”. In other words, it looked legit. I tapped the number, and got connected to Sheldon.

Not a good sign

It wasn’t until he asked me to upload images of my family’s passports to a janky-looking website that my head started to spin. When our cab pulled into the departures zone, I hung up on Sheldon and ran to United’s customer service counter in tears. I showed the agent behind the counter our “boarding passes”. 

“I don’t know what these are, but I will help you,” the agent said. He booked us on the next flight, through Frankfurt, at no extra cost – a holiday miracle.

When we arrived at our gate, I called American Express and contested the charge before cancelling my credit card. I then contacted Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, to put a fraud alert on my file. Next, I filed a complaint with the FTC and reported the fake ad to Google.

American Express wound up resolving the dispute in my favour, but the memories of this chaotic Thanksgiving will stay with us forever.

Here’s what consumers can do to protect themselves from travel scammers:

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