In the middle of a glorious family vacation to Greece earlier this month, I was tempted to extend our stay — our first big trip since Covid. So I googled the customer service number for the airline and clicked on the number at the top of the search results.

Attempting to make flight changes while admiring the sun setting over Mount Athos and keeping an eye on your small children swimming in the Aegean turns out to be ill-advised. The chaotic summer of 2022 is proving to be a great one for travel scammers, as I was about to discover.

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Finally, if you do fall victim to a flight scam, report it to the Federal Trade Commission, says William McGee, senior fellow for aviation at the American Economic Liberties Project. The agency won’t resolve individual claims, but it does aggregate complaints and share them with other law enforcement agencies to spot trends and go after scammers. After I returned from my three extra days in Greece, that’s exactly what I did.