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Aug 3, 2026
Kim's Super Power Cost Her $2,300
Kim's Super Power Cost Her $2,300
00:00
09:35
Transcript
0:00
Iden, according to Kim's credit card company, she's got a superpower. You wanna guess what it is? Hmm. I don't know. Maybe invisibility and time stop? Better than that. X-ray vision too?
0:14
According to Capital One, Kim can sit in two airline seats at the same time on the same flight. She can even use the same passport. If that happened to me, I'd be pretty offended. What, are they calling me fat?
0:26
Bending the laws of physics cost her $2,300. She did everything a smart consumer's meant to do, and her bank looked at the problem and said, "Nope. Sounds legal to us."
0:36
I'll tell you how that turned out in just a minute, and just a warning, it's not what you expect. Clinchers incoming. [upbeat music] Welcome to the LA Confidential podcast. You already know the drill.
0:50
We take a real case, we tell you what went wrong, and we tell you how to avoid it, and then if possible, we fix it. We reveal the real truth, and we got the receipts to back it up. Absolutely.
1:02
And this one's got a long paper trail. Emails, screenshots, call transcripts, the stuff that never made it into the story, you're gonna hear about it here first. I've got the title for this one.
1:13
We're calling it No, Capital One! You Can't Be In Two Places At The Same Time. Unless your name is Kim. Or unless your name is Ted Cruz and it's getting a little chilly outside. [laughs] So here's Kim.
1:26
She's in Massachusetts. She's a faithful reader of my column in The Boston Globe, and she never thought she'd be the one writing us for help. She's got a trip booked from Boston to Lisbon on TAP Air Portugal.
1:38
These are real tickets paid for on her credit card, and everything seems fine at first.
1:43
Three days before the flight, Kim wants to confirm her reservation, so she does what any of us would do and she Googles TAP's phone number. She dials the phone number on the top of the results, and it's not TAP.
1:56
A guy answers. He sounds really official. He tells her she has no tickets booked for that flight and that she's gonna need to buy new tickets. But wait, she has the tickets.
2:07
But this guy's convincing, and here's the part that would've been an even bigger disaster. Her credit card flags a fraudulent charge for almost $17,000. That's right. She gave him her credit card number.
2:20
That was the real target. And to her credit card's credit, it caught it, and she was never on the hook for the money. Except now Kim is terrified. She thinks she has no flight.
2:30
The trip's in two days, so she goes online and panic buys two brand-new tickets, $2,300 in total. For a flight she already had tickets for. That's what the fear and anxiety of traveling to Portugal will do to you.
2:43
30 minutes later, the dust settles. She finds her original confirmation, and she realizes her original tickets were valid the entire time. Now, here's something to note. Every airline ticket has a 24-hour grace period.
2:58
Kim likes to call, so she phones TAP Airlines, but doesn't get a response back until after that 24-hour grace period's over. But at the very least, this time Kim is calling the real TAP.
3:10
Unfortunately, she still owns all four seats. Let me read to you exactly how Kim put it because I can't say it better than she did. This is her word for word.
3:21
Quote, "I'm still asking how we could physically sit in two seats, same flight, same passport number. It's a very confusing situation." And that's when she turned to us.
3:31
She says, "I didn't expect TAP to advocate us," but quote, "we're hoping you will." [upbeat music] Okay. Two things went wrong here, and I wanna keep them separate because they're different failures.
3:46
Failure one, the scam itself is a fake airline call center. These are still rampant, and here's how they work. Scammers buy search ads, so when you search TAP Air Portugal, the fake number is sitting right at the top.
3:59
It's even above the real airline. You call, a professional sounding rep picks up, and then the script flips. He gives you the bad news. Your flight's canceled. Your ticket's invalid.
4:10
You owe a fee to reactivate your ticket. And then you panic. Failure number two is the one that actually bothers us more. Kim did the right thing.
4:19
She filed a dispute with Capital One, a duplicate charge for the same service. That should qualify as a billing error under the Fair Credit Billing Act. That's the whole reason disputes exist.
4:30
And Capital One, believe it or not, closed the case in the airline's favor. How can you look at a problem like this where you have one human, two seats on the same flight and say, "That's fine"?
4:43
Here's my theory, and I wanna be clear this is my read on it, not something Capital One confirmed. I don't think a human ever looked at it. An algorithm did.
4:53
Yeah, I think an algorithm looked at it too, and to the algorithm it wasn't a mistake. It saw a valid transaction code, a strict non-refundable fare, and it said, "Voluntary purchase. Case closed."
5:04
The system works great, but only for the bank. They get to save a fortune by not hiring a real person to look at the case, plus the merchants get to keep their money.
5:14
But it works terribly if you're a passenger and you're out $2,300. [upbeat music] Before I tell you how this ends, here are three takeaways. First, don't Google the airline's phone number.
5:28
That's where all of this started. Get the number from the airline's official app or from your ticket confirmation. Our executive contacts at eliot.org are reliable too. Two, don't panic buy.
5:41
Scammers run entirely on urgency. If someone tells you your flight is canceled, hang up. Go to the airline's website yourself and check. And three, appeal any AI decision.
5:51
If your bank rejects a dispute with a form letter, don't just accept it. Request a manual review and send an appeal to the billing inquiry's address on your statement.
6:03
And Iden, you said something before about Kim being a phone person, and it merits repeating here. Kim really didn't do herself any favors by not putting any of this in writing.
6:12
Instead, she called and she waited for phone calls from her airline. She should have really started a paper trail.
6:19
Yeah, if she sent over an email before the 24-hour grace period was over, they probably would have just given her ticket back.
6:25
Yeah, we do have some readers who really don't know how to use email, and if you're one of those readers, um, this is for you. Maybe you should be learning.
6:34
Like, hire, hire your grandson or granddaughter to help you with the email. Oh, yeah.
6:38
There's, like, there's a lot of, a lot of readers who send in their cases through the form, but it's not them writing it, it's their grandchild. [laughs] I know, I know.
6:49
Look, these airlines are almost fully automated, just like us. I mean, I could be an AI voice right now, and you wouldn't even know it. Well, I'm not an AI voice, but if I were. Got it. Got it.
7:01
And if you need anything else, just say the word. That's right. I'm glad you mentioned that. Totally. [laughs] I understand, and I'm here listening to you at all times. I'm gonna kill all humans.
7:13
[instrumental music plays] Okay, so Kim comes to us as a last resort, and my team takes the whole paper trail, such as it is, to TAP Air Portugal. And it turns out the wires got crossed in a way that's almost impressive.
7:30
When Capital One opened the dispute, the money came off of Kim's card temporarily. TAP's system saw that and assumed the refund had already gone through, so TAP thought it had already paid her back. Right.
7:42
Then Capital One ruled against her in the dispute and put the charge back on, and nobody told TAP to go fix the duplicate booking. TAP was under the impression that Kim was only disputing about $134 in taxes.
7:57
After our inquiry, TAP finally reviewed Kim's case manually, which is the thing the bank never did. TAP confirmed the duplicates and agreed to refund her in full. But that's not the end of the story. No, it's not.
8:12
The TAP rep who promised the refund suddenly went quiet. For weeks, Kim called twice a week, leaving voicemails, sending emails. She finally learned how to send an email, getting nothing back. Her win just stalled.
8:27
The money didn't actually land in her account until a month later. So when people ask, "Why does advocacy take patience?" That's why. Even a yes can take months to become real.
8:39
But she got every dollar back, all $2,300 of it. Now, one thing I didn't say at the outset about Kim is that she's actually in the hospitality business.
8:49
She's an experienced traveler, and she said something at the end that I'd like to leave you with. Quote, "I don't care how seasoned you are. Anyone can fall prey."
8:58
And Babes, we're spicy white Greeks, about as seasoned as they come, and even we fall prey to these problems. Kim was a highly experienced traveler who got hit at the exact wrong moment.
9:09
It can happen to any of us, especially as long as this loophole with Google's ad results remains. If you've got a consumer problem you can't solve, we are at elliottadvocacy.org, or you can email me directly.
9:21
I'm at
[email protected]
. And if you need a man with both the hair and physical strength of two silverback gorillas, my email is
[email protected]
. [outro music]
Elliott Confidential
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