An acquaintance of mine recently left a message on my FaceBook page offering to help me find my next dream vacation at a fraction of what I might normally expect to pay. When I got over the surprise that this person had actually worked as a travel agent all this time and no-one had bothered to tell me, it got me curious about the world of independent travel agents across the United States, how much personal and financial information they might have access to, and whether the industry is vulnerable to identity theft (like any industry isn’t?).

I had barely started investigating, when I came across a story about how the Feds just busted a ring of dishonest travel agents who had developed a very lucrative travel business based on their own creative way of exploiting stolen credit cards.

The thieves had apparently been running a very successful scam, for many years, offering flights to destinations around the world at prices too hard to resist – usually at a fraction of the true ticket value.

But the thieves didn’t care what the true value of the tickets were because they didn’t pay for them. Instead they used stolen credit cards, easily available on the black market, to purchase the tickets online. To minimize the risk that a stolen card would be detected and flagged, the thieves usually purchased the tickets at the very last minute so that the plane would have landed and the customer long gone by the time the airline realized they’d been duped.

A few things in the story jumped out at me. The thieves were able to run this scam as a seemingly legitimate business for nearly a decade without being caught, which doesn’t say much for the ability of the airlines to spot fraudulent cards and transactions.

And the customers buying these cut-rate tickets at a time when cheap tickets are as rare as bull’s milk must have known or at least suspected that something was not right.

Lessons learned?

• If it appears too good to be true…. Airline tickets at a knock-down price are rarely genuine, and anyone offering them should be subject to very careful scrutiny.

• Watch your credit card statements. It’s obvious that stolen credit card numbers are still very easily to buy and to use, and yours could be next.

• If you can’t find a good independent agent, one that you know and trust, might be worth paying the extra and dealing directly with the airline.

Related posts:

1. The IDGuardian Podcast: Episode #011 — Identity Theft Against the Elderly
2. A Big Score in the Fight Against Identity Theft
3. Identity Theft Targeting the Elderly
4. Identity Theft: An International Conspiracy
5. Be Safe While Traveling