Hi All. I'm wondering if anyone else has encountered this issue. I made a booking on the TAP website that I needed to cancel. So I went to their website, logged into my booking and asked to cancel. A message popped up saying cancellations were unavailable online and to call 801-931-1821. I called the number and some person from a foreign call center answered. I told them I needed to cancel and they looked up my reservation. They then quoted the cancellation fees in Euros and said the company policy was to pay the fees up front. I was surprised but its a foreign airline so I didn't question it too much. I authorized the charge with my credit card and he sent a confirmation email with the details. So, I decide to go online 5 days later and check the status of the flight and its still active. I call TAP airlines and they say that it wasn't them as they deduct cancellation fees from the refund. I am almost 100% I was on their website when this happened. I sent all the information to TAP to look into but now I'm paranoid about booking on foreign airline sites. I will get the fraudulent charge back from my credit card but I'm still upset at myself for falling for this. I wouldn't have except that the number was on their website.

It is unlikely that the actual airline's website was hacked in this way.

What is far more likely (and sadly, fairly common) is that some bad guy "spoofed" the airline's website by creating one that looks similar, and used a similar domain name/URL to the legitimate website, and then played some tricks with search engine optimization so that THEIR fake site appears near the top of search results in the hope that you will click on it.

Here's an example. Let's say that you want to go to American Airlines website, and you don't know that it is aa.com, or that you can type americanairlines.com and it will send you to the right place. Since you don't know, you go to your browser search and type american airlines and hit search. Say one of the results comes back as americanairline.com - that is not the airline (and is actually blocked by my security settings) - that could be an example of a site that is trying to fool you into thinking that they are the airline and that it's safe to share your info. They direct you to their own phone number and take your credit card info and have their way with it.

Another version - much more common - happens when you google something like "Ryanair phone number" (or whichever airline). Those results seem to be scams most of the time.

Summary - if you now believe that you gave your credit card info to someone who is not an employee of the airline, and you didn't get the service that you thought you were paying for, it is urgently time to get in contact with your credit card company and start looking to get your card canceled and replaced, and a fraud investigation launched.

I thought about that but I did my usual search even now and the legitimate TAP site is the only one I find. I They would also have to link live to the real TAP page in order to pull up all the reservation information as I did the lookup. The interesting thing is that number I called is still active, so they are still out there scamming people.

Sounds like you hit a scam phone number. If TAP confirmed it wasn’t them, the website itself probably wasn’t hacked.

Welcome to Flyertalk tigobar

TAP's number is +1-800-931-1821 (https://www.flytap.com/en-us/help) not the one you posted.

I think you�ve spotted the problem. This came up last year when a United agent googled �Lufthansa� to find the customer service number and help a passenger get rerouted. The United rep unwittingly connected the passenger to a scam operation. Phone number the United agent found via search was to the scammers.

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Travel/ma...y?id=124873491