Google's AI is recommending scam airline numbers hidden on hacked university sites

Scammers have a new trick for stealing travelers' money, and it hides in plain sight on Google. Fraudsters are breaking into the websites of universities, charities, museums and government bodies, then quietly uploading search-optimized PDF files packed with fake airline customer-service numbers. Google's AI Overview and AI Mode are now presenting those bogus numbers as the official contact lines for major airlines.

One traveler, Marcia Hannon, found out the hard way. She was helping a group of six travelers in their 70s and 80s fly from Boston to Geneva via Zurich on Swiss International Air Lines. When Swiss changed a flight and made their connection too tight, the number on the tickets no longer worked and the airline's chat queue sat at 47 people.

The phone number on our tickets for Swiss was disconnected.

Hannon waited over an hour for the chatbot without her place in line moving, so she Googled a number instead. The person who answered sounded official and asked her to sign a credit-card authorization form, which arrived bearing a Swiss logo. Minutes later, American Express flagged a $4,500 charge from WHOP - a digital marketplace with no affiliation to the airline. Amex stopped it before it processed.

How fake numbers climb the rankings

The Points Guy ombudsman Michelle Couch-Friedman dug in and found the mechanism. A search for "Swiss Air" made Google's AI Mode stitch together an answer that urged travelers to ask for a "tier-two claims agent" - and the citation was a hacked page on the University of California Merced website. Searching "Swiss flight irregularities" led to a hacked fertility-clinic page branded as the airline's "Primary US escalation line."

Rutgers University had even become one of Google's top "authorities" on nearly every travel question Couch-Friedman tried, all because of strange PDFs planted across its site.

The fix is simple: pull a support number from the airline or hotel's own app or website, never from a search result alone. If you already called a scam line, alert your bank and the travel company and consider identity monitoring. Reporting the listing to Google helps, but it can linger for days or even weeks.