Qantas passenger's $600 mistake sparks major warning: 'Easy to do'
A glaring oversight in a text from Qantas left one Aussie $600 out of pocket.
A Qantas passenger has issued an urgent warning to Aussies to "be careful" of scammers after he was swindled out of $600 by phoning the airline's US customer service number with his Australian sim. Or so he thought.
Seasoned traveller Paul Stewart said he received a text from Qantas notifying him his flight from Los Angeles to Sydney was cancelled last week. Desperate to get home as quickly as possible, he phoned the Qantas 1800 number provided in the text from the airline for those who need "immediate assistance".
But instead of getting through to the Qantas customer service line in the US, he inadvertently phoned 'scammers' who are targeting unwitting Australians in the US travelling with Aussie sim cards. "I hadn't realised that 1800 numbers are locked to particular countries," Stewart told Yahoo News Australia. The mistake initially cost him $600 and he's now urging Qantas to do something about it.
"The text message was from a Qantas number, there were previous Qantas text messages ahead of it," he explained. "I don't think I was especially reckless. So I think it's kind of an easy thing to do. Qantas needs to change the text, even if they just add the area code in front of the number."
Because the number provided is registered to the United States, US sim card holders will get through to the airline. But Australians using their local sims will instead get through to an Australian 1800 number if they don't add an area code – and scammers have hijacked that number.
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Speaking about the phone call with scammers, Stewart said when the man answered his call, he sounded "dodgy" but added that "Qantas is known for off-shoring their call centres", so he wasn't alarmed.
"I assume they were Qantas so I give them my booking reference and my name, and that's all anyone needs to access anyone else's booking details," he said. Unbeknownst to Stewart at the time, with these two pieces of personal information, scammers were then able to access all of the details connected to his flight.
"They said I can either pay a fee and the flight will be changed to the next day, or wait in LA for a few days and have it done for free," he said. Desperate to get home, Stewart decided to pay the $600 fee and chase the airline for the money once he got home.
"They were saying the right things. They seemed to know details about my booking," he said, so reluctantly he handed over his bank details. Afterwards, the flight details were seemingly updated.
"So it was all looking legitimate," he said. But it wasn't until reflecting that he thought it all seemed a "bit weird" and phoned the airline through a different phone number.
Stewart said the customer service representative told him there shouldn't have been a fee for the flight change, and there was no history of the phone call he'd just had. It was then that he realised he'd been scammed.
“I’m the technology literate person [in my family] and I get scammed. So it was quite humbling," he admitted.
Yahoo News understands a number of passengers have been affected by the scam and the airline is providing support to victims.
Qantas has reported the scam to the Australian Communications and Media Authority and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. It has also updated its communications to customers to warn of the danger.
According to the company, the fraudulent number has now been deactivated.
Remarkable end after Qantas passenger scammed
Remarkably, Stewart decided to politely phone the scammers back and ask for his money back, and they obliged. “Maybe they're thinking that they know they're onto a good thing, so they don't want me to complain, so maybe they just think I'll go away quietly," he said.
Stewart is now warning other Aussies to "be aware of the increasing complexity of scammers and is calling on Qantas to make a change so that nobody else goes through what he did."
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