Today - on my personal AOL account - I received the following email :
American Airlines Order#2830976
It was posted at 1:52 am.
Since I have been booking a couple of clients on AA, I opened it. It read:
'Dear Customer,
FLIGHT NUMBER AB712
ELECTRONIC 7715835
DATE & TIME / JANUARY 29, 2012, 09:21 PM
ARRIVING / Oklahoma City
TOTAL PRICE / 112.11 USD
Your bought ticket is attached to the letter as a scan document.
You can print your ticket.
Thank you for your attention.
American Airlines.'
It had a 'ticket.zip' attachment.
All well & good, except that I never booked such a flight.
Hmmmmm.
After a few seconds I realized that this message only contained ticket/airline/destination info & no passenger names nor data. A red flag.
A quick call to American - after finally bypassing its very annoying & time consuming automatic answering system - revealed that this was a 'phishing' email sent to screw me out of personal info & possibly 'virus up' my computer.
2 very unpleasant possibilities.
And thousands of these emails have been received by unsuspecting customers.
AA advised that the best thing to do was not open (too late for me) & delete.
So, children, the moral of this story is - if you receive a questionable email from what seems to be a reputable company about a purchase you haven't made - do not respond by email but phone the company in question.
And don't call any company # included in the suspicious email. Google the official company's on line site & use the # listed there.
I just got something very similar:
ReplyDelete"Hello
FLIGHT NUMBER AB712
ELECTRONIC 2701923
DATE & TIME / JANUARY 29, 2012, 09:12 AM
ARRIVING / Oxnard
TOTAL PRICE / 122.27 USD
Your bought ticket is attached to the letter as a scan document.
To use your ticket you should print it.
Thank you
American Airlines."
I got suspicious about it since I have not bought any air ticket recently, also, this big companies usually give a lot of more information, like direct links to the eticket, phone numbers, etc., so google it and found this post, confirming my suspicious. Being this a phishing email, it is a very bad one, they didn't took the time to do it more credible.
Sal
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing. Glad that my blog was able to help. If you have any other travel questions, feel free to write back & I'll be happy to research them.
Happy traveling.
Jack