Travel scams: airline customers targeted by fake accounts on X

Scammers are infiltrating genuine customer queries and complaints on X (formerly Twitter) to target customers of major airlines. 

Frustrated customers often take to social media to ask companies for help, but Which? has found that scammers are impersonating trusted brands with ease. 

Here, we expose the scam and explain how you can stay safe on social media.

Dodgy customer service accounts

Scammers crawl social media – often using bots (a type of automated software) – to quickly find customers contacting an airline. 

They then respond to your query or complaint hoping you won't notice you're being contacted by a fake account. 

For example, a Which? researcher, who contacted the genuine Wizz Air X (formerly Twitter) account (@wizzair) to ask if a flight was delayed, received responses from two fake accounts almost immediately. 

Both used near-identical language, apologising for the inconvenience, stating that they had ‘already escalated this matter to the relevant department’ and requesting a ‘reachable WhatsApp number for assistance’ via DM (direct message). 

We found examples of bogus X accounts impersonating every major airline operating in the UK, including British Airways, easyJet, Jet2, Ryanair, Tui, Virgin Atlantic and Wizz Air. 

We also discovered that fake accounts are often quicker to respond than the genuine airlines, but they also interrupt existing conversations between you and airlines, which can be harder to spot. 

In terms of tactics, a scam account may:

ask you to send a DM with your phone number and other sensitive data (they may ask for your booking reference or flight number first, to appear legitimate)

direct you to click on links to phishing websites that harvest your card details 

claim you are entitled to 'compensation' or owe a small fee to resolve your issue to trick you into downloading a payment app (examples reported to Which? include Remitly, Skrill and WorldRemit) 

pay for a blue tick verification on X to appear legitimate.

Is enough being done about fake accounts?

Reporting fake accounts to X seems to have limited success. Most of the posts and accounts we flagged as impersonation scams using the X reporting feature were still live at the time of writing.

When Which? told the X press office about this, it said: 'All accounts you have mentioned have been suspended for violating the X Rules', but offered no further comment.

When we asked seven airlines if they could confirm how many fake accounts they had reported to X so far this year, none gave us a direct answer, and none would confirm if they had considered leaving X due to the prevalence of fake accounts targeting their customers. 

British Airways, Ryanair and Virgin Atlantic didn’t respond at all.

easyJetJet2TuiWizz Air

How to spot fake X accounts 

Before engaging with a company on social media, check its official website for links to its social media profiles. 

Here are the genuine X accounts for seven major airlines:

@British_Airways (with a gold verification tick)

@easyJet (with a gold verification tick)

@jet2tweets (with a gold verification tick)

@askryanair

@tuiuk (with a blue verification tick)

@VirginAtlantic (with a gold verification tick)

@wizzair (with a blue verification tick)

It’s also sensible to check when an account joined X and how many followers it has; for example, the fake X account @AskAirWizz joined in February 2024 and had only 217 followers at the time of writing. The real @wizzair account, which joined in July 2012, has more than, 80,000 followers. 

Airlines will never ask for your bank or card details over social media, so any requests for financial data are an immediate red flag.

Social media can be useful for minor queries, but never give personal details. Instead, contact customer services via the relevant claims or call centres. Details on how to contact your chosen airline can be found on its website.

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What to do if you’ve been scammed

You should also report the offending account to the relevant social media platform. 

To report something on X, click on the three dots and select ‘report’ from the dropdown menu. You can also report individual tweets, again by clicking the three dots above the tweet. 

Find out more: undefined

source https://www.which.co.uk/news/article/travel-scams-airline-customers-targeted-by-fake-accounts-on-x-aZ06a7s683Xj