When I was a kid growing up in New York, baggage claim checks were required when leaving the airport with your luggage. I used to only see this at New York-area airports. I helped prevent people from picking up the wrong bag, and also prevent someone from intentionally taking a bag that didn’t belong to them. I haven’t seen that process in a U.S. airport in many years, and of course New York isn’t the city that it used to be when Ed Koch was mayor where this really was necessary.

Maybe that would have stopped two men who have been charged with stealing over $550,000 from U.S. airlines by making false lost luggage claims since 2015.

Pernell Anthony Jones Jr, 31, of Kenner and Donmonick Martin, 29, of Chalmette are accused of collaborating to submit more than 180 claims over five years to American, Alaska, United, JetBlue and other airlines for nonexistent lost luggage.

As part of the plot, Jones flew on commercial airlines under fictitious names and with fake identification from 2015 to last year, the government contends. When he arrived at his destinations, he allegedly reported his luggage was lost and requested compensation from the airlines, which mailed him reimbursement checks.

Martin agreed to allow his home address and PayPal account to be used for receipt of reimbursements, and on one occasion falsely reported a lost bag himself at Louis Armstrong International Airport, prosecutors alleged.

They’d provide a list of high-end valuables, naturally, that were packed in each bag to run up the claim to $3500 on a lost domestic bag. In 2020, fewer than 45,000 out of 209 million checked bags were both lost and never actually found last year.

According to American Airlines,

We’re pleased the Department of Justice is pursuing this matter.

It seems like it wouldn’t be difficult as a one-off now to both collect your checked luggage and report the luggage missing. Airlines track your luggage much better than they used to. Whenever I check bags I look in the American Airlines app – I see when when they’re scanned at each stage of the process, from one flight to another and off the aircraft as well. An airline will know that a bag has been unloaded, but it may not make it onto the belt, or another passenger could have taken it.

If one person consistently filed missing bag reports, that would look suspicious. It would be even more suspicious if that person filed these reports when the checked bag had in fact made it to the destination airport every single time. So using fake IDs to travel under different names is key here, though it seems the same address was given for delivery of the missing bags that would never show up, and the same payment instructions were given for lost luggage compensation.

I’m surprised the thieves didn’t double dip and file missing bag reports with a credit card that offers lost luggage protection (they used gift cards as debit cards for their purchase instead). If they’re committing fraud anyway I’m not sure it’s that much of a step further to create synthetic identities, get approved for credit cards, and do more than just a bust-out but commit insurance fraud as well.

Then again large scale credit card fraud can be accomplished mostly online – and this scam actually required flying, and appearing in person at a baggage office to report luggage lost. Airports are one of the most surveilled places in the country. There are cameras everywhere. The most surprising thing in this story is just how long it took to get caught.

(HT: Paddle Your Own Kanoo)