Watch out for scams this holiday travel season

Morning. Have you made travel plans for the holidays yet? Or maybe you're like me and you're still trying to figure it out. Well, listen up. New Google scams are costing travelers thousands of dollars. Joining me now is the director of travel content, Eric Rosen at The Points Guy. He has more on what you should look out for. Good morning, Eric. Good morning. Yes, as you pointed out, we're seeing more and more of these scams on Google. You know, something goes wrong with your trip. You've got to change your flight or something. You Google the customer service number for your airline and you just sort of dial whatever's there. We've been finding, though, that a lot of scam call centers have found their way into these search results and they're doing it in a particularly tricky way right now where they've hidden this information on government sites, religious organization sites, even medical clinics that have a lot of authority in Google searches. So these answers populate themselves in your result. You call the number, some friendly agent takes your credit card information, and suddenly you have a charge for thousands of dollars that you didn't mean to authorize. So we want to help travelers prevent falling into that pitfall and save their hard-earned dollars for their actual travel plans. Yeah, that makes sense. And then also, too, I mean, we've all probably seen these scams or come across maybe one or two of them, right? Can you give an example of maybe a situation where a traveler was scammed? Sure. We had one reader at The Points Guy reach out to us because something happened with a flight she had to Europe on Swiss Air. They had to make a last-minute change for herself and a group of travelers with her. So, you know, in a bit of a panic because it was coming right up and she wasn't getting through to customer service, you know, via the airline app or the website, she Googled the number for Swiss. Called the number, a very friendly agent picked up immediately, which should also be a telltale sign because when was the last time you called an airline and got through immediately to somebody, who offered to change her flight. The only thing that she had to do was pay for a new ticket, and then this agent promised he would refund the original ticket. So without thinking, because she was panicked, she did that, only then realizing that she had probably fallen prey to a scammer. She hung up immediately, called American Express, who had luckily flagged this. This charge is possibly fraudulent, so they prevented that from being charged. Now, the other thing is, presumably she'd given this agent, whoever he was, her record locator and stuff like that. So the next thing you need to do if you do find yourself in this situation is find the actual number for your airline, call them directly, and tell them to put a hold on your record locator so that someone else can't change anything about it for you. And then, two, government sites are typically trusted, right? So anything that's like .gov, .edu. But how are scammers now using those sites? Sure. This is the whole issue. And what makes it just so sneaky, right, is that when you Google, like, let's say Delta Airlines customer service, right? If you see a bunch of numbers pop up in the AI search results, right, you've got to go click to the link where they're actually being sourced from. If it's not Delta's site itself, chances are this is a fake number. So what scammers are doing are creating these PDFs or other types of files. Hacking into government sites, hacking into sites for charities, religious institutions, anything, you know, a university with an edu suffix to the end of the URL, and hiding these pages on their sites so the admins don't even see them. Google's bots can see them, though, and can surface them in the search results because they have so much authority, you know, as a result of being a .gov, a .edu, or whatever it happens to be. The thing that travelers need to do is when you Google the results and you look for the numbers, make sure you're seeing which site those numbers are coming from. If you're finding an airline number on a Gov site or an EDU site, chances are it's not real. Instead, just go straight to your airline's app and contact the airline either through their chat feature or find the phone number on the airline's app itself. Do not go to Google for search results right now. All right. Thank you so much for those tips. And for more travel tips, you can visit thepointsguy.com slash travel. To learn a little bit more.