Scammers cost British Airways passenger £4k by cancelling booking out of spite

Exclusive: BA said tickets cancelled by fraudsters could not be reinstated, forcing couple to pay again for poorer seats

Happier times: Geoff and Dawn Spink in Danielsville, Georgia before they learnt their British Airways booking had been cancelled (Geoff Spink)

A London couple lost a pair of British Airways business class flights from Atlanta to London because scammers cancelled their booking out of spite.

Geoff Spink, a 63 year-old retired broadcaster and writer on disability issues, had booked BA Club Class returns on British Airways from London Heathrow to Atlanta at a cost of £5,091. He was travelling with his American wife, Dawn.

After the outbound flight on 27 October, Mr Spink discovered he had left a fleece on the aircraft. Because the North Face garment had been especially altered to accommodate his limb difference, he set about trying to retrieve it.

He got in touch British Airways, which told him correctly that he should contact the lost and found department at Atlanta airport. But, he says: “Lost and Found at Atlanta advised me to deal with my airline – so it was a closed circle that went nowhere.”

Mr Spink then took to social media to try to spark some action to retrieve the lost property.

As The Independent has reported, fraudsters create countless fake accounts on X (formerly Twitter), representing themselves as airline customer service departments.

Mr Spink received multiple responses from what appeared to be British Airways accounts, such as “BA Claim Review”, “BA Assistance Help” and “BA Travel Advice”.

The standard scam is to intercept posts in which passengers are seeking to contact the airline. The procedure is:

• Scam account asks the passenger to contact them by direct message (DM) and provide a mobile number
• Fraudster calls on WhatsApp, offers compensation and asks the passenger to download a legitimate money transfer app so that the promised amount can be transferred
• Victim is asked to “enter a code” that is actually an instruction to send the scammers hundreds or thousands of pounds

“I initially took these to be genuine,” Mr Spink said. “These people tried to persuade me to download an app so that I could receive compensation for the fleece. I soon realised that this was a scam and I stopped answering the phone and the DMs.”

As part of the attempted theft, scammers ask for the passenger including the passenger name record (PNR): six letters and digits uniquely identifying a booking.

Armed with this code and the passenger’s last name. the criminals can access the reservation through the “manage my booking” function.

Mr Spink soon realised he was being targeted by criminals and made no further contact. But the scammers were out for revenge. Having wasted time and effort trying to steal from him, they went online to ba.com, entered his name and booking reference and cancelled the flight.

There was no benefit to the fraudsters because the £600 refund of taxes and charges that were due after the illegal cancellation were returned to Mr Spink.

“This was the scammers saying, ‘F*** you,” an aviation insider said.

The fraud victim noticed an email from British Airways telling him about a cancellation – but he assumed it was part of the scam and ignored it. Only when he tried check in that he found that the flights had been cancelled.

“The website and the BA app informed me that there was no such booking, “ Mr Spink said. “A call to BA confirmed that the booking had been cancelled ‘via the website’. I spent considerable time on the phone explaining the problem to someone in a BA call centre in India.”

The call handler said the only option available was to buy new tickets. The cost for a one-way flight from Atlanta to London Heathrow – for which he had already paid – would cost him £13,088. This was more than twice the fare for the original return flights. Mr Spink eventually bought premium economy tickets home, costing £3891.

He told The Independent: “I would say that I am tech savvy and often the person that others call upon for cyber advice. I’ve taken training courses in how to spot ‘phishing’ and ‘smishing’ and I like to think that I'm ahead of the curve.

“If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. Why on earth doesn’t BA have some kind of two-factor authentication whereby they send a code to your mobile so that you can confirm that it is in fact you cancelling the flight rather than a criminal?”

Mr Spink believes British Airways could try to track down the IP address – the identifier for the computer that was used to cancel the booking – though criminals routinely use virtual private networks (VPNs) or IP spoofing to conceal their location.

His travel insurer rejected his claim. But American Express, the company whose card he used to book the flights, has asked for further details of the fraud and may reimburse his financial loss.

Mr Spink said: “Cyber security needs to be taken far more seriously by BA and other large corporates.”

British Airways has declined to comment.

Read more: Seven ways to spot a holiday scam