Fake Customer Support: When Help Becomes the Trap

Customer support is supposed to be where you go for help — but Felix Bick’s How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps explains in Chapter 68 how this exact channel has become a significant fraud vector.

Bick describes two related but distinct patterns. First, fraudulent trading and crypto platforms frequently maintain surprisingly responsive, professional-seeming customer support channels, since ongoing support interaction builds trust and can be used to extract additional funds, through fake “withdrawal fees” or “tax payments,” once a victim attempts to withdraw their deposited balance.

Second, and separately, entirely fake customer support operations impersonate legitimate companies — banks, exchanges, well-known trading platforms — through fraudulent phone numbers, chat widgets, or search-engine-advertised contact information, intercepting users seeking help and redirecting them toward fraudulent “resolution” processes that instead extract funds or credentials.

Bick’s recommended defense addresses a genuinely underappreciated vulnerability: verifying customer support contact information directly through a company’s official website, typed directly rather than searched or clicked from an unsolicited message, is important given that search engine results can be manipulated through paid advertising to display fraudulent contact numbers above genuine ones.

This last point is a particularly valuable, often-overlooked warning — many people assume that a phone number appearing at the top of search results for a company must be legitimate, when in fact paid advertising placement has been exploited repeatedly to place fraudulent contact information above genuine listings.

For anyone who has ever searched for a company’s customer support number rather than navigating directly to their official website, this chapter of How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps offers Felix Bick’s essential correction to a habit that feels safe but genuinely isn’t.