The Best Frauds, Scams, and Big Company Cons in America Today

Airline Pricing Fraud -- Pay more because you're American!

AT FIRST WE DID NOT BELIEVE THIS SUBMISSION -- BUT THEN ON TESTING IT, WE FOUND IT TO BE TRUE!  AMERICANS ARE BEING DUPED INTO PAYING HIGHER FARES THAN OTHER COUNTRIES! Airline companies have you all figured out, locked into their little pricing conspiracy -- and there is no way you can get out of it.

SUMMARY:         Duplicitous Pricing structure based on country of inquiry. This amounts to a discriminatory pricing fraud concocted by Airline companies to extort more money from the most gullible markets. Nature of Fraud: This issue concerns International travel to overseas destinations. In essence, you are deceived by the Airline companies into thinking that all fares are a certain amount to a certain destination, when in fact, they are artificially inflated because you are inquiring from the United States. In truth, our near neighbors, like Canada, are getting the SAME fares for a LOT less money than you are in the U.S. Why? Because the airlines take you for a fool, and assume you are gullible enough to pay top dollar, without question. Sadly, they are right, for many people. Core Issue: For many years, anyone who has traveled north across the border into Canada knows that it simply costs more to be Canadian. Food is more expensive, as is gasoline, as are houses, building materials, staples, and almost all everyday household items. It has become a fact of life for the past 25 years or so, that you expect to pay more in Canada, because the economy is "higher-priced" than it is in the U.S.  That was a "given". Aha!  But NOT for Airline fares. Sure it USED to be that Canada was more expensive than us for such things as international travel. And Airline companies are probably relying on this common but outdated perception, hoping that no one will find out, or question this truism of living in the north. But now, thanks to some startling input from a Canadian reader -- we learn the horrible truth that the Airline companies have been scamming us, relying on this old perception, and hoping we won't discover the truth.  This is another first for BestFrauds.com.  Now we have discovered the truth, we are going to spill the beans ALL OVER America -- may the extortionists lose the battle. When you read this submission, at first, you will not believe it. But the test is VERY simple. Just get on the internet to various "travel fare booking agencies" and test it out. You will soon find out, as we did, that this Canadian is dead right -- the Airlines have been taking us as rich fools for many years. So exactly how many years is that?

Reader Submission: Here is the essence of this duplicitous Airline price fixing.  Before you scoff at it or reject it, read the entire letter, then our "Analysis" below. ------------------------------------------------- Say, I just read your article about the Dallas conspiracy, and if you think that's something, just wait till you hear this. You wanted more input on airline scams -- well friend, here it is. Shudder at it! I was down in the States visiting some friends of mine, and we were talking about my recent trip to Australia. I was telling them how I got out there and back for under a $1000 Canadian -- about $750 US -- and they said "Nah man, no way! It's way more than that. You've gotta have your figures wrong". So I used their computer to get on the Net -- logged onto my favourite travel agencies in Vancouver, and pulled up the fares from Vancouver to Sydney. But I'll be dammed if they didn't come up all in the range of $1200 to $1800 US Dollars!!! So I said, Hey, what the hell gives here. I'm logging in to my travel agents site in Canada, and I'm getting fares from Vancouver to Sydney, and they are coming up in American dollars??? What the blazes does American dollars have to do with a trip from Canada to Australia, then back to Canada? What kind of double dealing is going on here!! Well then, I tried it again, and I'll be hosed if it didn't happen again. But this time I was paying more attention. So I watched what happened. Sure I got onto my site in Van -- www. cdntravel.ca -- you can tell it's a Canadian website by the .CA extension (I've just given you a sub name, not the real site). But then I noticed that at this Canadian website, when I clicked on "get fare quotes", then I was rerouted to some .COM address -- nothing to do with my original site. It was the fare "finder" that was giving me the American dollars. So here I was, dialing so to speak from America, and getting these over-inflated American fares for a trip plan that had nothing to do with America -- why, it shouldn't have even entered into the picture. After all, if you fly from Dallas to London, do they quote the fare in Mexican Pesos?  Of course not. So what the hell gives?? Well, the answer never came until I got back home. And sure as saved, when I did the very same fare search from my home in Van, sure as all get out it came up in the right dollars -- Canadian of course. And there were the fares, just as I've told you -- less than $1000 Cdn (only $750 American) to fly from Van to Sydney return. It was too much to figure out at the time. Now I've had time to think on it, I've figured it out. When you are in America (i.e. dialing from a US address on the Net), somehow the airlines detects your IP address as coming from the States -- so they send you on to some American site where you get these outrageous fares -- God man, some fares to Sydney and back were upwards of $3000.00 -- Well, Canadians would just laugh 'em off the street! But when you call in from a True Canadian address, then the airlines route you to the proper place, and you get the real Canadian rates that you really get when you get on the plane. So these airlines companies are ripping you Americans off -- they know you're a bunch of suckers -- you watch that Paul Hogan stuff about Crocodile Dundee, you get all het up, and you pay those God-awful prices. I'm telling you people in the States, these airlines are really taking you for suckers -- and you are, to pay those kinds of high prices. We Canadians wouldn't put up with it. If you don't believe me, just get on the net from a US address, log onto any Canadian travel agent you can find, do a fare search to Sydney or any other overseas spot, and sure as you're on, you'll get some outrageous fare in American dollars -- almost twice what we pay here in Canada. And you don't even know you're being ripped! Now, personally I don't mind them taking you for fools, but what really gets me is I'm Canadian, and when I'm in the States, I can't get the real fares that I should be getting as a Canadian, just because I'm dialing in from a US address. It's really criminal, I think. The airlines need to be raked over the coals for this one -- seems to me they have some real fraud scheme they're pulling on you fellas. Good luck, and do try what I said. You'll find they are scamming you all the way to the bank. G. J. , B.C. Canada. Received, Apr. 7, 2002
Analysis: After we took this letter seriously, we assigned someone to do exactly what this Canadian guy said. And -- you guessed it -- he was exactly right. We cannot claim that we tried every Canadian travel agent, but we can tell you that whenever we got to a .CA Canadian website, and did a search on prices of any overseas destinations, we always got rerouted by the "fare finder" application to an American .COM website, and the fare came up in American dollars. And indeed, when we actually placed some calls to Canada, we found out that these fares quoted in American dollars -- for international travel that did not even include an American stopover, or destination -- they were all much higher that what Canadians were paying for the same flights. It was stunning! Conclusion: As far as we could determine, Americans are indeed being taken for fools by the Airline companies. As best we could figure out, from watching the IP addresses change, that it is not the Canadian sites that do the rerouting. It seems like ANY site you pick to get fares -- American or Canadian -- they all link to some central Airline Fare Server which determines the fares. Built into that server, or group of server applications, is some kind of IP or domain detect routine. If it finds that your domain is actually in the U.S., you are dished up a whole suite of over-inflated, extortionary prices for international travel -- always in American dollars. We could never get an international fare to come up in the real currency where the flight originated from -- like Canada, etc. So the airlines are second-guessing you. When we called other people to check the same fares from their countries, sure enough, the fares not only came up in their currency, but in almost ALL cases, the fares were LOWER than what you pay in the U.S. for the SAME ticket, even if the flight itinerary has NOTHING whatsoever to do with the United States. Stunned, we can only conclude that the Airline companies are all conspiring together, in some huge International Cartel of Price fixing and selective extortion, to conduct wholesale consumer fraud and price gouging of the markets that they feel will pay the greatest amount of money -- namely, us poor "suckers" in America, whom the airlines obviously take for the most gullible fools alive! Resolution: It has taken us some time to actually publish this article, because we wanted to be sure of the facts before putting it on the web. Now we are convinced, after considerable thought on the issue, that this kind of covert pricing conspiracy is nothing short of a criminal activity. In all seriousness, people during the first half of the century were tried, convicted and jailed for activities like this, under the name of the "mafia" and like organizations. But now, major airline companies can do exactly the same thing, on a much larger scale, much more covertly, and never get caught at it -- because the poor old Federal Government is either too stupid to figure it out, too afraid to act on it, or too bought-out to care. What a pathetic state of affairs, and how ashamed we are to have to report that this kind of blatant discrimination is going on. Sure, airline companies will hotly deny any wrongdoing whatsoever, or they will justify their actions with some smooth, placative double talk, but at the bottom line, it IS extortion. Look up the legal definition, and you will find it fits perfectly. So what can we do about it? Well, we've done our part. We have informed the world via this site. Now it is up to you to do your part -- check it out too. Get on the Internet, and try to disprove our findings. As we said, we could not be exhaustive in all possibilities, but what we found DID corroborate his report.
Here we will post any additional, germane, reader input:   If you have checked this out, and have any factual information to add to this horrendous realization, please submit it to us, so all readers can be apprised. We await your constructive assistance.................
Latest Update Feb 28, 2004