DLASflyer

I'm skeptical of this story. What did the charge show up as? Credit card chargebacks are on the merchant. Is it possible this was an actual Delta agent who didn't know what (s)he was doing? $125 just so happens to be the actual Delta name change fee in certain circumstances.

https://airlinespolicy.com/name-chan...change-policy/

Stygian7

I would expect Amex would issue a new card number now that a “scammer” has all the info.

Adelphos

While I don’t doubt the OP, I just tried “Call Delta Customer Service” via Siri on my iPhone and got a “Sorry, I don’t have a number for Delta Customer Service” response. A “Call Delta” question brings up a few possible selections

flyerCO

Sorry, but a lot of people would expect with today's technology to be connected with DL. In fact this is what scammer is counting on. They wouldn't make money if it was common sense that asking, "Siri, connect me to DAL" might not connect person with DAL.

MSPeconomist

Does Siri consistently give the same answer to the same question or does the answer you receive depend on your browsing history, location, what Siri thinks it knows about your demographics, etc.?

flyerCO

It could also be someone report that it was dialing the wrong number.

I know with Google, you can report that it dialed wrong number, pulled up wrong address, etc...

Sometimes this is how scammers get the phone number changed to begin with. It calls the correct number, but then scammer reports it was incorrect and correct number is X.

enviroian

Would you ask siri to connect you to Delta?

I didn't think so.

enviroian

Sorry I respectfully disagree. Siri...is just a novelty and not to be used for anything other than looking for a local sandwich. I would never entrust such to deal with something as important as an airline reservation.

Can't anyone be held accountable for common sense anymore?

hhdl

This isn't that different from searching for a hotel on google and getting OTAs which are better at SEO (because that's basically what their business depends on) listed ahead of the hotel's site (setting aside issues of ad placement).

Q&A type search (distilling all manner of results into a single answer) is going to make mistakes. Paradoxically the better it gets in general at reducing the rate of mistakes, the reasonable expectation is that the damage of those mistakes (definitely per-mistake and quite possibly even in aggregate even controlling for number of queries) will increase.

flyerCO

I agree its not be used how OP friend used. However what seems like common knowledge for you and me isn't necessarily common knowledge to most people. Many years ago,, I learned from someone much wiser than me, "common knowledge isn't necessarily common."

Also Siri/Alexa/Hey Google are far from a novelty nowadays.

MSPeconomist

I turned Siri off because it kept responding when I wasn't trying to ask it anything, such as when I was talking to someone. Very annoying.

ijgordon

It goes beyond travel - my husband typed a clothing brand name into Chrome, and instead of just going to the site it generated search results, the first being a Google ad that redirected to what turned out to be a VERY convincing counterfeit site apparently run out of China. He paid with PayPal (can’t recall if that was the only option - would have definitely been a red flag) and it was a bit of an effort to get PayPal to refund the charge (we would have gone to Amex next as the underlying payment method). The “merchant” did ultimately ship counterfeit goods too, presumably to have a paper trail in their favor. BTW the link redirect the next day was changed to a counterfeit site for a well-known jewelry retailer. Must be quite the operation.

travelhive

Well now I know better. I thought when you asked Siri call someone, it would select a name that was saved on your Contacts list (where I do have a Delta number), not necessarily do a Google search.

flyerCO

If you have a contact saved by that name, it will call it. However if not it'll do a search.

diburning

Also, keep in mind that Siri does not know you want Delta Air Lines if you just ask for Delta.