In 2024 the average age of a “typical” cruiser clearly changed. No longer is it only the senior crowd that is the target audience as we have new-ish cruise lines like Virgin Voyages that is targeting those over 18 but clearly not those really old (you know what I mean).
Even so there are still a large percentage of cruises that are a bit on the older side of the age dial. Sadly many of these older folks are not as tech or perhaps “worldly wise” when it comes to scams as their younger Frequent Floaters. The result is a new ugly scam that seems to be growing.
A Reddit user “Vegetable-Counter158” posted the following recently and it is something we all should really take note of as these scum scammers are targeting cruises:
“I just got off a call with a number that was supposedly an NCL official number, but when we asked him a question, he totally unrelatedly said that we had unpaid port fees? He also didn’t know what email we added to the reservation, he said we had voicemails from Norwegian but we checked and had none, and he tried to get us to pay $394 over the phone. On the website, it says there is nothing pending and that our payment is complete. Please help, do we have a fee to pay or not? Also the phone number we called doesn’t show up anywhere on the NCL website. I don’t know where Google got the number from.” – Vegetable-Counter158
Oh boy! There is so much wrong with this it makes my head spin. First up I will commend the Redditor for doing one smart thing, that is, going to NCL and logging in to their account and checking to see if something was in fact due. You should never ever simply give someone calling you your credit card number and absolutely never EVER go buy any kind of a gift card if they ask you to. Either is a major red flag.
You may also have some empathy for the cruiser because the phone number seemed to be official. This is called “spoofing” where the criminals use technology to make it seem like they are calling from some company. I mean if your phone caller IDs the number it does make you think it is really them calling you from the beginning so we must be cautions and not trust what is displayed on our phones.
Beyond this, and ever more so with the new helpful laws in place to display the full price (mostly) upfront, you should never have to pay for port fees or other fees separately after you have booked the cruise.
Bottom line is scammers are targeting cruises and we need to be smart and while on this topic another reminder never to give out any of our cruise information until we get home on social media! – René
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