A unsuitable phone call ended up costing this woman hundreds.
Anyone can fall victim to a scam — especially when you’re the one unknowingly contacting them.
That’s what happened to a mom named Haylee who called American Airlines — the airline she and her family of 11 booked flights with for an upcoming cruise.
As explained in a recent TikTok video — where Haylee was clearly still in shock in regards to the deceitful scenario — she has a daughter and niece on the autism spectrum, so she called the airline “because I desired to see if there have been any accomodations or anything we could get for my neice and my daughter, like priority boarding or could get on the plane sooner…”
“I’ve never been on a plane with my children before, so anytime I’ve flown somewhere, it’s been through Southwest and it’s either been just me or me and another person,” she continued.
Haylee looked up the airline’s phone number — something anyone would do — “I assume I have to’ve not clicked the number since it rerouted the page…”
Without realizing what happened, the mom clicked the primary number she saw and the person on the phone asked for the family’s flight confirmation numbers.
Seems normal.
“He’s spouting off all of our information, I’m pondering ‘Oh yeah, that is real, he’s got all of our information,’” Haylee said in her video.
The scammer even rattled off the last 4 digits of the bank cards that were used to book the flights.
“He comes back and says, ‘I could provide you with…$150 off per ticket, priority boarding and we’re going to have you ever sit on the front of the plane but in an effort to do that — I actually have to refund each of the cards which could take 7-20 business days…’ he said he was going to refund the cash on each of those cards and put all of it on one card — $5,250, giving us $1,600 off the complete thing,” she shamefully said in her video.
“Why did I fall for that?” the girl regretfully groaned in her video.
After asking a number of more questions — including one other bank card to run — the scammer managed to charge this woman’s bank cards hundreds after which sent a phony “confirmation” reciept with a tiny detail that alluded to the undeniable fact that no a part of this example was legitimate.
“It says within the body of the e-mail that it was [from] ‘flight trip’ — not American Airlines.”
After checking her American Airlines app and seeing that her original flights were still there, untouched, Haylee suddenly realized that this example was an enormous fat scam.
The horrified mom went into damage control, locking each bank cards and disputing the charge.
Clearly scammers don’t discriminate because most of the commenters on the video shared their similar experiences.
“It’s okay, I almost got scammed for a job that sounded too good to be true, since it was. They were claiming they’d send me a MacBook to work at home and pay me $36/hour and I used to be thrilled. Until they asked me for my cc number. This complete interaction happened on WhatsApp. It might have been so bad.”
“This happened to me once once I called or tried to call a cable company, clicked a link and was rerouted to a different link phone number. Luckily hung up when it began to sound sketch but this is unquestionably a thing.”
“The identical thing happened to me, nevertheless it was my cruise cabin.”
