A Front Desk Agent Caught an Overnight Caller Inventing a Fake Travel Agency Name On the Spot—and Shut Down the Scam Mid-Sentence
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Working the overnight shift means dealing with weird stuff nobody warns you about in training.
For one front desk worker, that weird stuff came in the form of a very persistent, very fake sounding phone call.
A few times a month, in the middle of night, she’d get calls from someone claiming to be a “travel agent,” always asking to confirm whether a specific guest had checked in hours earlier.
When she refused to hand over guest information, the calls didn’t stop, they just kept coming back every few hours, apparently hoping to wear her down or catch a less careful coworker instead.
You’ll want to keep reading for this one.
I get scammy calls from ‘a travel agent’ asking about guests
I get calls from a ‘travel agent’ asking about guests, 99.9999% sure this is a scam, just don’t know what the point is.
On my NA shift, I get these calls a few times a month, in the middle of the night.
There are quite a few red flags from these calls.
They sound like they’re from a call center in Asia. They never identify what company they’re working for, like calls from Expedi-you-know do.
The calls all follow a similar pattern.
They say they’re calling to confirm a reservation. It’s always about someone who checked in hours earlier. When I ask who the caller is, they say “a travel agent.”
When pressed they make up the most fake-sounding name for the travel agency, think ‘Lucky Travel’ or ‘Unicorn Travel’.
These scammers are pretty persistent people
When I tell them I can’t give them guest information, they just won’t take no for an answer. They keep insisting on ‘just’ knowing whether the guest checked in or not.
I am a stubborn mule and give them nothing. They will call back several times over the next few hours and try the same thing again, I assume hoping to talk to a more pliable front desk agent.
The employee never falls for it, but still it’s starting to grind his gears.
This rings all my scam alarm bells, and it’s only slightly dumber than the “Patel, this is your boss” scam. Just wanted to rant a bit.
How annoying.
What did Reddit have to say?
These people don’t deserve to be given the time of day.
Maybe AI could have something to do with this.
These kinds of scams really don’t make sense to this commenter.
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How dumb do these scammers think people are?
Real travel agencies have names, websites, and a reason to exist beyond a single overnight phone call. “Unicorn Travel” is obviously not that.
Whoever’s behind these calls clearly banked on hitting a tired employee willing to confirm a check-in just to end the conversation faster.
But this employee never slipped, not once, not across dozens of calls spread over months.
Persistence works both ways, and hers just happened to be stronger.
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