After I'd put my email address in and he said to put this password in that he'd created,

he then said, are you going to get verification so pinned through on your phone? Give me that.

Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the night of April.

That was the voice of Karen Welsh, who, like thousands of other airline passengers

was contacted by villains pretending to be an airline, in this case Qatar Airways. Today,

you're going to be hearing the story of what unfolded. I have family in Brisbane and my uncle isn't very well at the moment

and I'd been planning to go and visit. I'd ended up finding some flights that were really

agreeable with me time-wise and days-wise through Qatar. So I'd gone onto the website and

tried to book. It wasn't accepting the payment page. It was buffering and so

on. So I'd contacted them through Twitter, private messages, and asked for help. This went on for

about six days and I just struggled to get an outcome really. So I eventually put a public message

out on Twitter saying, I'm struggling booking flights with

the Qatar can anyone sort of offer any advice or whatever? And I'd received two private messages,

both from the company that I thought, one of them saying, oh yeah, please contact us, which is the one

I'd already been communicating with. And then another one that suggested it was a complaints department

saying, we've escalated

this. From there, I've received a message saying that a member of our complaints team is going

to contact you via WhatsApp. We're taking your complaint seriously. We're going to contact you

by WhatsApp. What are your contact details? And I did send them my mobile number. So then they

contacted me on WhatsApp. On their

screen, it said complaints and whatever. They rang me from a different number again,

but one that says it's customer support. And the gentleman who I spoke to said that the airline

...