Phishing E-mails Targeting British Airways Customers, Cautions Action Fraud

The fraud reporting agency at the national level in UK named Action Fraud has issued an alert to British Airways (BA) customers for being wary of phishing e-mails doing the rounds, according to softpedia.com dated February 24, 2014.

Action Fraud outlines that the e-mails' caption seem as being spoofed so the messages look as originating from an id BA.CustSrvces@email.ba.com.

To appear increasingly persuasive, the fake notifications even carry a variety of details like booking reference, time and date of flight departure as well as ticket price.

They further state that the recipient can see his seat and flight numbers on the ticket's downward portion and that he should take a print out of the same by downloading from given web-links. However, doing the ticket download may deliver malware.

Worryingly, just like British Airways, many other Airlines such as US Airways, Jetstar Airways or Delta Airways frequently get targeted with phishing scams because travelers often fly on these airlines. Also, because of this, e-mail scammers rely on numerous readers of their messages who taken aback following receipt of a notification regarding an airline ticket they didn't at all purchase would click web-links for checking the flight particulars as well as consequently infect their computers in case the web-link really carried malware.

However, within some instances at least, e-mail readers may've really bought one airlines ticket and so be increasingly inclined to click the web-link devoid of caution.

Nevertheless, for eschewing the above kinds of e-mail frauds, BA reminds customers that genuine e-mails from the Airlines that have booking references won't get dispatched from Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail, which are all web-based mail systems, therefore must be carefully handled. Additionally BA states that it'll request customers to give their card payment particulars only when the latter want to refund else alter their booking on the company's website namely ba.com. Such particulars are needed when the card has to be credited/debited in connection with the ticket.

Hence, anybody getting a fake reservation e-mail like the above mustn't click/open a web-link/attachment given inside it. Instead he should inform about it by dialing the helpline number of Action Fraud.

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