Scam-busters: avoiding scams targeting airline customers

From time to time fake Jetstar Facebook pages appear, promoting competitions requiring you to do nothing but like or share a page to win prizes such as free Jetstar flight tickets. These are often ‘like-farming’ scams, which accumulate thousands of likes and then sell the page on to dodgy marketers.

Apply the golden rule: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Always carefully check the Facebook account before entering any competitions. Our legitimate pages have the blue ‘verified’ ticks so you can tell they’re the real deal. Also look at the number of followers – if they only have a few, that’s a good sign they’re imposters. Our official Jetstar Australia account has 796,000 followers (and counting).

People have received scam emails from a website with the domain ‘jetstar-com.com’. This scam domain has since been taken down, but be sure to check the URL of the site you’re on before booking your flights. The safest way to do so is by manually typing ‘jetstar.com’ into your browser’s address bar every time you visit our website, or save this URL in your browser’s bookmarks or favourites.

We also have subdomain sites like booking.jetstar.com, but they will always have ‘.jetstar.com’ at the end. So, if you see a URL like ‘booking.jetstar.com’, you can be sure it’s a legitimate Jetstar site.

We haven’t seen it for a while, but in the past there have been cases where emails have been sent from a fake Jetstar address, with PDF itinerary attachments containing a virus. Always be very careful about opening attachments to emails that you aren’t expecting. Examine emails carefully and be aware of signs that they may be fake – poor spelling, random capitalisation and strange punctuation are giveaways that you may be looking at a ‘phishing’ email. Legitimate emails from Jetstar will always come from addresses ending in ‘@jetstar.com’ or subdomains like ‘@email.jetstar.com’ or ‘@v.jetstar.com’.

More recently, we've seen cases of text messages that seem to come from a legitimate Jetstar address, telling the recipient they’ve won a competition and providing a link to click on.

If you receive a text message, even if it seems to be from ‘Jetstar’ as the sender, that claims you are the winner of a competition and asks you to click on a link: don’t do it. We will never send you an SMS for anything other than flight information, updates or alerts – anything else is not to be trusted.

Another phone scam is when callers try to impersonate Jetstar representatives and ask you to provide credit card details to process a change or refund for a cancelled flight. A Jetstar Representative will never ask for your credit card details and will always verify the customer's identity before providing or discussing any booking details.

Scammers sell fraudulent Jetstar vouchers online (usually via private Facebook groups, Gumtree or eBay). People who buy them will find they can’t use them to travel on Jetstar flights. Even if they’re able to book a flight using the voucher, the flight will be cancelled soon afterwards. Jetstar vouchers are not for resale, as stated clearly in their terms and conditions.

If you know of any other scams targeting Jetstar customers, get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter/X to let us know. Quickly sharing information about scams is the best defence we have against them. A big thank you to customers who have contacted us already about the scams they have encountered. Your efforts are making the internet a safer place for everyone.