Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and today it is Wednesday the 12th of June and I am bringing you a scam special. Yes, I have been contacted by some villains who are trying to extract some cash from desperate EasyJet passengers.

And here's how it works.

At the moment, as you will know, 180,000 passengers' journeys have been cancelled by EasyJet.

And there's a great deal of pressure people trying to contact the airline find out what their rights are get compensation

rebook on sensible flights on other airlines all that stuff and so what the scammers do is really

very straightforward appallingly easy indeed they set up a fake account on twitter, pretending to be EasyJet.

It's got, you know, might have EasyJet spelt with a Z.

It might be EasyJet with a couple of letters juxtaposed.

It's got the familiar orange logo.

So they set that up.

They then search for anybody who's mentioned EasyJet in a Twitter post.

They then get in touch.

They respond to that and say, oh, please send us your contact number by direct message so that we can talk to you.

So I did.

And they then called me very quickly after that with on the, by WhatsApp.

And it came up with a Kenyan phone number.

And well, it then developed very interestingly. This was a guy

called Mr. Patrick, he said, and he kept asking, for example, for the Gmail address I'd use

for the booking. I said I hadn't, and I sent him a fake email address as well as a fake booking reference.

And I pretended, but I didn't really need to pretend because I've had a flight council from Gatwick to Milan.

I said I wanted compensation for that.

And so therefore the way that it began was with him pretending that they were very concerned

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