Your boarding pass – a lucky ticket for a scammer

Scammers are becoming more inventive every year. Special overlays with a card reader on ATMs are a thing of the past. A truly inventive scammer can extract the necessary data even from a scrap of your boarding pass! In this article, we’ll look at how they manage to do this.

They’ll find you on social media, hack your page

We have already written that you should not post your airline ticket on social media, as this can lead to your social media page being hacked, at the very least. In fact, scammers can do the same with the stub of your boarding pass.

Usually, people don’t bother with this and throw away unnecessary stubs in the trash upon arrival or even leave them on the airplane seat. But this small piece already contains enough information: your first and last name. It’s easy for an attacker to find your social media page and hack it. From there, they can find out your address and even come to clean out your apartment. You might think: “Oh, who would bother with that? It’s too complicated.” But those who need to, will bother.

They’ll hack your personal account

Barcode and QR codes are used almost everywhere now, especially in aviation. This significantly saves time during passenger boarding. All information is stored in these codes, and passport data is no exception. Therefore, in the wrong hands, they can harm the security of passenger data. What else?

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Knowing your data, read from the ticket, and that you are a member of some airline’s loyalty program, a scammer can hack into your personal account. Once they gain access, they can dispose of your miles and points as they please. And if you also have a bank card linked to your personal account, you can say goodbye to your money.

A cunning call

Not all scammers want to bother with hacking a personal account; it’s easier for them to call. And there are two options here: they call on behalf of the client or on behalf of the airline.

In the first case, the attacker, having obtained enough information, calls the airline and impersonates you. They then invent a story, the outcome of which is a request to restore access to the account. And once they get it, they will do whatever they want.

Another option: call you and impersonate the airline. They will then tell you that someone tried to hack your account. To prevent this from happening again, they will suggest changing your password right over the phone. In such situations, the user usually gets confused and dictates a new password directly to the scammer on the phone. And voilà — they have access!

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How to protect yourself and your data

At the very least, don’t scatter boarding pass stubs everywhere, and don’t post the boarding passes themselves online before departure. If you can use an electronic boarding pass at the airport, use it instead of a printed one. And if you really don’t want to carry these papers around, make sure you throw the unnecessary stub into a trash can, not somewhere else. Even better — tear it into pieces.