Scammer swindled flyer out of $5K

A wrong phone call ended up costing this woman thousands.

Anyone can fall victim to a scam — especially when you are the one unknowingly contacting them.

That’s what happened to a mom named Haylee who called American Airlines — the airline she and her family of 11 booked flights with for an upcoming cruise.

As explained in a recent TikTok video — where Haylee was clearly still in shock about the deceitful scenario — she has a daughter and niece on the autism spectrum, so she called the airline “because I wanted to see if there were any accomodations or anything we could get for my neice and my daughter, like priority boarding or could get on the plane sooner…”

“I’ve never been on a plane with my children before, so anytime I’ve flown somewhere, it’s been through Southwest and it’s either been just me or me and someone else,” she continued.

Haylee looked up the airline’s phone number — something anyone would do — “I guess I must’ve not clicked the number because it rerouted the page…”

Without realizing what happened, the mom clicked the first number she saw and the man on the phone asked for the family’s flight confirmation numbers.

Seems normal.

“He’s spouting off all of our information, I’m thinking ‘Oh yeah, this is real, he’s got all of our information,’” Haylee said in her video.

The scammer even rattled off the last four digits of the credit cards that were used to book the flights.

“He comes back and says, ‘I could give you…$150 off per ticket, priority boarding and we’re going to have you sit at the front of the plane but in order to do this — I have to refund both of the cards which could take 7-20 business days…’ he said he was going to refund the money on both of those cards and put it all on one card — $5,250, giving us $1,600 off the entire thing,” she shamefully said in her video.

“Why did I fall for that?” the woman regretfully groaned in her video.

After asking a few more questions — including another credit card to run — the scammer managed to charge this woman’s credit cards thousands and then sent a phony “confirmation” reciept with a tiny detail that alluded to the fact that no part of this situation was legitimate.

“It says in the body of the email that it was [from] ‘flight trip’ — not American Airlines.”

After checking her American Airlines app and seeing that her original flights were still there, untouched, Haylee suddenly realized that this situation was a big fat scam.

The horrified mom went into damage control, locking both credit cards and disputing the charge.

Clearly scammers don’t discriminate because many of the commenters on the video shared their similar experiences.

“It’s okay, I almost got scammed for a job that sounded too good to be true, because it was. They were claiming they would send me a MacBook to work from home and pay me $36/hour and I was thrilled. Until they asked me for my cc number. This entire interaction happened on WhatsApp. It could have been so bad.”

“This happened to me once when I called or tried to call a cable company, clicked a link and was rerouted to another link phone number. Luckily hung up when it started to sound sketch but this is definitely a thing.”

“The same thing happened to me, but it was my cruise cabin.”