Looking to the collective wisdom of the FT community for ideas on how to take down a scam "travel agency" that took my parents for a few hundred dollars and, based on online reviews, did the same to a bunch of other people as well.
The site is FareBooth(.com)
(1) It looks OK at first blush, although they try at every opportunity to get you to call in, promising lower fares. That's a red flag in and of itself - pretty much every legit airline ticket outlet charges a fee to talk to someone, they don't give you a discount.
(2) A lot of buttons on their site are fake - not connected to anything. For example, clicking on "my bookings" does nothing
(3) When you conduct a flight search you get real results back, but (1) every ticket is $25 more expensive than it should be, and (2) the results page says "only X tickets left" for each results, where X = exactly the number of seats you said you're looking for. More evidence of a scam.
(4) If you dismiss all the pop-ups asking you to call and go through the process to book a ticket, you get a screen telling you everything is confirmed instantaneously (i.e. faster than the GDS could book it) with a fake PNR. At that point they have all of your information, but you don't have a reservation. Then they can either book a reservation for you, keeping the $25 as profit, or call you and try to sell you on something else.
In my parents case they called to complete the transaction, then called later and said they canceled the reservation. My parents rebooked with United directly and thought that was the end of it with farebooth. When they got their credit card statement they found out that (1) farebooth charged a $400 fee and (2) a couple days later they made a duplicate reservation with United, which they left for a month, then called a couple weeks before the flight to cancel. The duplicate tickets were charged to their credit card by United and remain open. I'm trying to get United to refund them.
My parents filed a dispute with Capital One, but their fraud department says this is all totally legit. Farebooth's customer service won't explain what the $400 fee is for - they have several diversionary tactics. They are now saying they'll cut a deal on the $400 fee if my parents give them $800 for a new trip using the duplicate tickets they fraudulently booked (and that I hope to get United to refund).
We're still fighting this out with Capital One, but I want to see if folks have other ideas on how to escalate and how to shut these guys down. They don't have any physical contact information on their Web site, but on the credit card the fee was charged as Air Travel Services 844-434-8900 NY. It looks like the duplicate tickets were issued by an Expedia affiliate, but Expedia claims to have no information.
There's a bunch of complaints about them online, and they fraudulently use BBB and Trustpilot logos.
https://www.bbb.org/us/mo/clayton/pr...0734-310590393
https://www.judysbook.com/FareBooth-...-r39297526.htm
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/farebooth.com
Edited to add - I did some more sleuthing and found out that this seems to be one scam site of a network of up to 108 operated out of India. Would be nice if the credit card companies would take some action - I checked a few of the sites in this list out and they have similar scam/fraud reports online.
https://www.scamadviser.com/check-we....farebooth.com