Originally Posted by
docbert
Companies frequently place "ads" for themselves so that they can be above equivalent ads for other companies trying to take their business. eg, American puts in an ad for themselves when someone searches for "united airlines". UA then puts in their own ad for the same term so they appear above AA.
The fact it's an ad doesn't necessarily make it illegitimate - although obviously it should have you at last asking the question...
There is clearly a difference for an AA ad appearing when you search for united airlines versus an ad that purports to be United and even has the URL listed in the ad giving the consumer the confidence that the information listed in the ad is for UA and not some scummy TA. If you look at the Facebook example I provided earlier, the scammers clearly state to be Facebook in the ad and the URL visible in the ad says Facebook.com Yet the number provided wasn't for Facebook but rather for a data harvesting firm.
At this point I think it's safe to say that you cannot trust what you see on search engines like Google with even the trained eye being easily deceived. I suspect Google is aware of their issue but they lack the technical chops to address this issue all of the time because Adwords is a big black box and no one really knows how the algorithm determines what ad to place where - it's really a roll of the die.
Originally Posted by
WineCountryUA
Not sure what you mean by "allowed" -- you can do it and there is essentially no way to trace who did it(except by IP address which is not useful in many cases)
Such as
Unauthorized flight reservation change made by someone else
This issue has been discussed many times and it is a needed feature for those that have others manage their travel. But it can be misused -- hence treat your PNR / BP with respect
And yes the scammers use this feature.
But can UA do anything about it for this traveller? Can they give them a new password (i.e. PNR) and invalidate the prior one? My gut says it can since I've had UA split PNRs before to confirm upgrades but don't know if the Univac supports that feature yet
-James