Couple traveling the world wants to pay a hotel reservation with a credit card under the boyfriend’s supposed mother with a letter that “authorized” them: ‘She tells me that it’s illegal for me to not accept that letter and she’s going to call the police’ – FAIL Blog

These scammers just think that we are all dumb.

In customer service, you always get to see the craziest things, the most entitled guests, and the most annoying requests. So if you worked in the environment for a while, you start to get the gist of it. You learn and become incredibly aware of your surroundings. That is extremely useful. You get to know when a customer is going to be a handful even before they open their mouths. You get to anticipate their movements and act in favor of it to avoid escalations and headaches. But as you get to see these things before they happen, you also get to discover scammers in a split second. Don’t tell me that isn’t a superpower.

In this story in r/TalesFromTheFrontDesk, we see some things that, if you work in customer service, may be really useful to learn how to spot scammers from a mile away. Here we have a young couple who seem to be traveling the world and have a reservation in a hotel. When the front desk employee is doing the check-in, she realizes that the card name and their ID names aren’t the same. She points out that she won’t be able to check them in if the card isn’t theirs, to which the couple replies that they have a letter of authorization. The first thing this employee does great is not playing into their game. She refuses to open the letter several times as she knows it won’t work either. After a while, she opens it just to say the same thing. The letter wasn’t even signed! These scammers thought that front desk employees were dumb enough to accept that awfully written piece of paper!

What is amazing is how she handled the situation. She explained why that didn’t work at all. She responded to the “I want to talk to the manager” with clarity, explaining that they were just going to say the same exact thing. And lastly, when they threatened to call the police, she encouraged them and even offered to do it herself. That is how you handle this situation. Props to her, and what a crazy story. But, well, it’s just another day at customer service.