A single-ring pickup from an airline customer service line should have been the first red flag. Instead, in the chaos of holiday travel and grief, it became the opening move in a highly polished airline customer-service impersonation scam that is now surging across the United States.
Three days before Thanksgiving, stuck in traffic on the way to Newark Airport and about to miss a flight to Berlin, a traveller phoned what appeared to be United Airlines’ “Agent on Demand” helpline. A man who introduced himself as “Sheldon” answered instantly, sounded empathetic, took down a callback number and promised to get the family rebooked. After hearing this would be their first Thanksgiving after the traveller’s father’s death, he even offered condolences before smoothly pitching a “solution”: a later Lufthansa flight, if they just paid the fare difference of about US$1,415 on an American Express card.
That payment turned out to be the price of entry into what US regulators formally classify as a business-impostor scam. In the first nine months of 2025 alone, more than 396,000 Americans reported such scams, an 18 per cent jump over the same period in 2024, with reported losses rising 30 per cent to US$835 million. The method changes—fake airline social handles, phishing links claiming flight cancellations, bogus customer-service numbers—but the strategy is constant: catch stressed travellers at their most vulnerable, when urgency overrides scepticism.
How Google Ads and AI Supercharged the Scam
In this case, the scammers weaponised search ads. Under crushing time pressure after United’s own app bots proved unhelpful and a genuine support link failed, the victim searched “United airlines agent on demand” on a phone browser. The top sponsored result displayed “United.com”, a 1‑888 number and a reassuring “1M+ visits in past month” tag. It looked legitimate enough to tap—connecting straight to “Sheldon”.
Only later did the victim discover that the number sat behind a fraudulent paid ad that had slipped past automated screening. Even after the ad was reported and removed, an identical sponsored result reappeared days later, forcing repeat complaints.
Consumer advocates warn that generative AI tools are now “supercharging fraud”: scammers use AI models to write convincing emails and chat scripts, seed the web with fake customer-service listings that search systems surface as relevant, and spin up cloned airline or support sites that look indistinguishable from the real thing. Automated moderation is often a step behind.
The Moment of Suspicion – And a Real Agent’s “Miracle”
The illusion only cracked when “Sheldon” asked the traveller to upload passport photos to a crude, suspicious website. As the cab reached Newark’s departures area, intuition finally overruled urgency. The call was cut, and the family rushed to a real United counter, where a human agent immediately recognised the bogus “boarding passes” and rebooked them—at no extra charge.
From there, the clean-up began: disputing the fraudulent card charge, cancelling the card, placing a fraud alert with a credit bureau, filing a report with the US Federal Trade Commission, and reporting the fake ad that had led to the scam number in the first place.
The airline, for its part, stressed that customers should only use contact information listed on its official site or app. Consumer groups say that advice, while basic, is now critical in a customer-service environment increasingly fronted by bots and vulnerable to impersonation—especially around holidays, when panic and urgency are the scammer’s sharpest tools.
