About six months ago United put a new status match system in place. It automates the process of considering credentials that a member is asking to match against. It looks at the status you already have and decides whether it looks valid and regularly approves status matches instantly.

However it appears that this new system doesn’t actually check whether what you’ve submitted as proof of status from another airline is… real. It just “checks if the electronic card format is correct.” And scammers, especially out of China, are just producing fake cards in the proper format for United to match.

Generating Fake United Status Is Quick And Easy

In a sense, it’s like my fake ID in high school. For $40, I got my real drivers license written over – new name and address, new date of birth. All of a sudden I was able to buy alcohol without any difficulty. The format of my ID card was correct!

Chinese individuals have developed sophisticated electronic card generation systems where one only needs to input a name, fake membership number, and expiration date to create a card eligible for UA Gold, Platinum, or 1K status. The approval rate for these applications is 100%. …Most of these individuals do not actually fly with UA but use their status for benefits with other Star Alliance airlines like Air China.

As a reader tells me, “these sellers have created templates for dozens of other airlines and developed a tool that generates various airline membership cards automatically by simply inputting a name. Their tool can also generate flight records, and they even provide fake foreign address proofs (such as fake utility bills) and fake passport images.”

This Website Now Has United Gold Status

A reader showed me how absurd the United status match system is. He created a MileagePlus account for this website and gave it Gold status. Needless to say, while I have airline status to match against, View From The Wing does not. This is the account he created, so that United could match someone named Viewfrom Thewing:

Getting This Status To Work With Partners

United only grants temporary trial status with a match, and that may not be honored by partner airlines. So there’s now also a fake United app “where the “TRIAL” status is replaced with a 1-year validity period, effectively deceiving the ground staff.”

Instant Status Matching Seems Impossible To Stop

When you grant status matches in real time, and match against fake credentials, it’s impossible to stop fake matches.

• United does attempt to shut down suspicious accounts, but that takes time
  
• And since these status matches are instant people are submitting them at the airport right before check-in.

  These individuals can create new UA Gold or Platinum cards within minutes, perpetuating the cycle. Some even register new UA accounts and match the status just before boarding their flights, making it almost impossible to detect and prevent this fraud.

These Status Matches Are Costly To United And Its Partners

United has tried to replace the manual, labor-intensive process of handling status matches – and taking an eternally long time to process them, which is a bad customer experience – with an automated process that people are using to create their own status.

• They use it frequently on partner airlines (like Air China!)
  
• They get lounge access, which is expensive to United, and free checked bags which means less revenue to the airlines

Mark Ross-Smith, whose Status Match (Loyalty Status Co) operates status match programs on behalf of 15 major airline brands, explains:

We’ve seen an increase in status match fraud attempts over the past year, but it’s not people photoshopping fake gold cards. It’s users matching to airlines that run in-house systems that have little to no protections outside of “does this screenshot look right?”.

Those users are being matched to that airline [without protection], and then one of two things typically transpires from there.

Either that status is being sold to a third party, where that third party will fly and not pay for seats, bags, they’ll enjoy priority access, lounge access, extra miles and in many cases put the burden of no-ancilliary revenue onto their partner/alliance carriers.

The second outcome is the user will attempt to match their newly acquired status (called, ‘insurance’) into another airline and if that other airline doesn’t have protections to know if it’s being chained matched from one airline to another … the cycle continues and airlines will continue to be ripped off by losing ancillary revenue.

United actually used to share membership information with competitors to combat status match fraud. Airlines were telling each other if you ‘really’ had status when you’d submit information to them, and denying status when people were photoshopping credentials. The airline has been bypassing efforts like this almost entirely.

Their current approach all seemed like a reasonable idea a year ago. Status match requests to United were up ‘dramatically’ with Delta announcing draconian changes to the SkyMiles elite program and they needed to do something to handle the volume. This, though, didn’t turn out to be a good idea.