[rferguson]

I often read about scams in the papers or see them on the news and feel great pity for these ‘gullible’ people that often seem to make very questionable choices by cold callers etc.

Well, today I almost joined them!

Last April I flew TAP from Porto to Paris and as far as I can remember, the flight was more or less on time with no dramas.

This morning I was checking my emails and there was an email from TAP. I opened the email and a very professional looking email with TAP corporate logos etc advised me that I had not claimed my compensation relating to my delayed flight from Porto to Paris back in April last year. Nothing really clicked at this point (except potential £££ signs) and there was a link to click, again looked very genuine starting flytap.com/xxxx. I clicked the link and it took me to the TAP refunds page. Again, a very genuine looking web page with all the TAP logos etc and tabs to click to book flights etc. On the face of it you would never guess you were anywhere else but Flytap.com.

There was one thing that seemed odd though. Even if I was entitled to compensation…WHY was TAP contacting me nine months after the fact to encourage me to claim money from them? In my previous experiences claiming EU261 airlines usually use every means at their disposal to refute these claims, not encourage people to. So I dug a little deeper. I tried to click on one of the tabs showing on the TAP website. I clicked ‘book flight’ and nothing happened. In fact, none of the tabs worked. I went back to my email and again clicked the flytap.com link. As I watched the URL it did not link to a flytap.com URL but was diverted to some random weird one. I also asked a friend who has one of the more expensive flightradar24 memberships to check the ‘delay’ on my flight back in april. It was 57min, nothing that would entitle me to compensation.

Finally, I googled ‘TAP refund scam’ and there it was. Last year their frequent flyer program has been hacked. I, probably like many on here had joined the TAP FFP when they were offering BA Gold status matches to obtain Star Gold. So, the hackers had obviously accessed members contact details and itineraries and they were able to email months later from a supposed TAP email scamming i’d imagine for bank account details.

I have to say I thought I was quite ‘on it’ when it comes to scams and what my mum has always told me came back to the forefront of my mind ‘if it seems to good to be true, it probably is’. I’ve read about other airline/hotel FFP’s being hacked over the past few months so be careful out there folks!

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[DrAW]

Interestingly I just got an alert from a monitoring service that my email address was found on the Dark Web and it had been from a TAP data breach.

[ImissConcorde]

As I’ve instilled onmy elderly neighbours….. If someone cobtacts you offering you something you haven’t asked for tell them where to go!!!!

[Author]

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