Rachel Dodes

December 29, 2025 — 5:00am

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. My family was about to miss our flight to Berlin, stuck in traffic en route to the airport in Newark, New Jersey. Blame a combination of poor planning, construction on the I-95 highway and five consecutive cancelled Ubers.

Scammers are creating websites that look like the official sites of airlines, then paying to come at the top of search results.

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, going through Munich. All I had to do was cover the price difference between the tickets: $US1415.97 ($2136.72) 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 calls a business-impostor or business-impersonator scam. Like thousands of others – including one reader of Traveller, who fell victim in Canada – I fell for this increasingly sophisticated deception, in which someone claims to represent a trusted company to extract money and personal data from an unsuspecting victim.

The specific techniques the scammers use vary: some pose as airlines on social media and respond to consumer complaints. Others use texts or emails 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 phone 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 spokesman said in a 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.”