If there’s a problem at the gate, good advice is expensive. At the counter of the responsible airline, a long line forms in no time at all. The telephone hotlines are often difficult to reach even without major crises. More and more people are therefore turning to companies via social media. In principle, this has several advantages: In fact, you can sometimes reach someone there very quickly, and the additional publicity of some messages puts the addressees under pressure to act promptly. Whether or not you can be helped is another matter entirely.
Nevertheless: Fraudsters also know that those seeking help seek support off the beaten path – and use it to create a new type of scam that Lufthansa has been warning about for months – and is now repeating the warning at travel time. Then as now it says: “Fake Lufthansa accounts have recently appeared on social media. For your own safety, please be extra careful when you receive a message from Lufthansa on social media, always make sure that it is from our official platforms.”
Lufthansa also offers a clear page showing which accounts on the common platforms actually belong to the company. This is particularly important because after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk changed the verification process to ensure that not all of the airline’s accounts were ticked – including the official “Lufthansa_DE” channel, which is followed by more than 260,000 people. . The repetition of the warning is therefore not only important because it obviously actively leads to problems, but also because in individual cases it is not clear whether the airline is actually dealing with a point of contact.
If you end up on a fraudulent platform, it usually happens very quickly – because personal data, reports “Loyalty Lobby”, are apparently shared extremely carelessly in stressful problems at the airport. This includes travel information, passports, payment information with full account or card details, or reservation numbers.
However, such information should only be disclosed in exceptional cases. Even if you don’t pretend to be an airline’s customer service, such documents often end up in the wrong place, the travel blog continues. Sensitive data would even be bustling about in his mailbox, always with a request for help.
As already mentioned, looking for help in social networks is only worthwhile to a very limited extent, even from official contact points. If you look at the tweets that Lufthansa sends to questioners every day, you often read that the social media team cannot help and refers them to the hotline or customer centers.
