aviation
Watch out for flight cancellations: Lufthansa warns of scams involving desperate passengers
You don’t look too closely when you’re under pressure – and that’s what scammers seem to take advantage of.
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When something goes wrong at the airport, the internet is usually the first choice for those seeking help. Fraudsters know this too – and are only too happy to pretend to be the point of contact for the airlines.
If there’s a problem at the gate, good advice is expensive. At the counter of the responsible airline, a long line forms in no time at all. The telephone hotlines are often difficult to reach even without major crises. More and more people are therefore turning to companies via social media. In principle, this has several advantages: In fact, you can sometimes reach someone quite quickly there, and through the additional publicity of some Messages put the addressees under pressure to act promptly. Whether or not you can be helped is another matter entirely.
Lufthansa lists official contact points
Nevertheless, fraudsters also know that those seeking help seek support off the beaten track – and use it to create a new scam that Lufthansa has been urging for months warns – and now repeated the travel time warning. Then as now it says: “Fake Lufthansa accounts have recently appeared on social media. For your own safety, please be extra careful when you receive a message from Lufthansa on social media, always make sure that it is from our official platforms.”
Lufthansa also offers one clear page, which accounts on the common platforms actually belong to the company. This is particularly important because after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk changed the verification process to ensure that not all of the airline’s accounts were ticked – including the official channel, which is followed by more than 260,000 people.”Lufthansa_DE“. The repetition of the warning is not only important because it obviously actively leads to problems, but also because in individual cases it is not clear whether it is a real point of contact for the airline.
Do not pass on data to third parties
If you end up on a fraudulent platform, it usually happens very quickly – because personal data, that reports “loyalty lobby“, are apparently shared extremely carelessly in the event of a stressful problem at the airport. This includes travel information, passports, payment information with full account or card details or reservation numbers.
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However, such information should only be disclosed in exceptional cases. Even if you don’t pretend to be an airline’s customer service, such documents often end up in the wrong place, the travel blog continues. Sensitive data would even be bustling about in his mailbox, always with a request for help.
As already mentioned, looking for help in social networks is only worthwhile to a very limited extent, even from official contact points. If you look at the tweets that Lufthansa sends to questioners every day, you often read that the social media team cannot help and refers them to the hotline or customer centers.