A Southwest Airlines employee at St. Louis airport has been charged with printing and stealing flight vouchers. For two months last year the customer service agent apparently generated vouchers in customer names – and redeemed them for himself.
He confessed after police found a stack of 119 travel vouchers worth $36,300 in his airport locker. He also sold some of the vouchers.
After his arrest, Jones said in an interview with police that no one taught him how to produce the vouchers, and he believed he was the only one doing it at Lambert. He also confessed to producing $79,000 worth of flight vouchers.
Police said Jones had received money for the flight vouchers on four separate occasions.
The employee is no longer with Southwest, of course. Just last year another Southwest Airlines employee at Chicago Midway airport was indicted for generating $1.87 million in travel vouchers and selling them at a discount. He would create compensation for disserviced passengers who hadn’t complained and didn’t know their records were showing as compensated.
At some point I wonder whether Southwest’s systems are just too easy to do this with? Although I suppose whether it makes sense to invest in better security depends on how many uncaught instances there are. After all, both of these folks were caught!
Isn’t it unlikely that the police just randomly searched the employee’s locker? Isn’t it more likely they got tipped off by the company or someone that there was fishy business going on with the employee and then decided to mark the locker for a search with employer approval?
Never got a voucher, other than an electronic one for a Covid cancelled overseas flight. Is this way of stealing even possible on other airlines?
@Dave W: It’s really just a print out of the electronic voucher they are talking about. You need to have the PNR and name. Essentially it’s a receipt. It exists electronically. My understanding is that it’s easy to make it transferrable by using it to book a higher fare (like Wanna Get Away Plus or higher) under the name that’s listed then cancel the flight to a credit, and then that becomes transferrable.
@GUWonder: Yes, almost certainly another employee tipped off. I used to have a pair of bolt cutters under my desk at the airport. And a sign reminding people that lockers were company property and could be opened for investigation, or if occupied more than 24 hours as they were shared units. Got the blessing from a US Attorney on that. haha
A thief will find a way to steal no matter what safeguards are in place. Apparently you have an agenda against Southwest airlines – this is not the first ( and probably won’t be the last) time you make a special effort to bash Southwest. What is your problem?
There are a few ways that stealing like this can happen with a lot of major airlines. For example, the involved employees may know which passengers were subject to IRROPS of some sort and entitled to a voucher for whatever and then later print it out and sell it to someone else rather than to give them to the entitled passengers. In some cases they can direct voucher business to a party which provides kickbacks in some form or another for getting to bill the airline for the value of the vouchers. Fortunately, most people aren’t criminally inclined, or perhaps we would get airlines getting rid of more staff and make things more “self-service” even faster and worse than they already do.
@David R. Miller: I don’t get the impression Gary makes *special* efforts to bash any airline, they’re all fair game to him! (Not that this is really an airline bash.)
It would be trivially easy for Southwest to 1) Log who generates vouchers and 2) Determine what percentage of those vouchers are redeemed for someone other than the original customer and 3) Generate a report of outliers and investigate.
I can see it getting to 80k before they are able to shut it down; the previous 1.87 million instance does seem egregious. (Which may be why they got it at 80k this time – they’ve since improved their processes to catch the problem earlier.)
Even at 80k, only 40k were redeemed, and the actual cost to the airline of that $40k is much lower; marginal cost on an additional seat is pretty small unless you’re on sold-out flights, of which southwest flights are generally not.
It’s so funny to hear people accuse Señor Leff of having an agenda against a particular airline. That he gets criticized like that for what he says about Delta, American, United, PIA and other airlines just goes to show he’s on target in a way those critics are not.
How is this happening? Are funds not reconciled with reservations? You can issue a ticket and bill the company, but eventually, you issue more tickets than revenue coming in.
Speaking of getting caught, someone got caught at ORD today, but it was worse: woman died getting caught in the baggage carousel:
https://us.yahoo.com/news/woman-dies-getting-caught-baggage-191427771.html
Christopher – obviously you are new to this site or do not visit often. Southwest has been repeatedly unfairly bashed multiple times here in the past year.
Other than as a flying passenger on regular paid Southwest Airlines tickets, what kind of financial or family relationship do you have with the airline? Something makes a person into a passionate company, industry and/or government apologist. Inquiring minds want to know.
“A thief will find a way to steal no matter what safeguards are in place.” I could easily imagine the culprit doesn’t think this is stealing, in the same way someone thinks password sharing on streaming or “stealing” cable isn’t stealing. I’m just filling otherwise empty seats, he thinks.
I wonder how many other rogue SWA employees there are who are stealing from the company which eats into the company’s profits which in turn makes SWA resort to reserved seating. Thank you, you greedy creeps
Based on my past experience, an employee makes an innocent mistake, then realizes no one notices. Also, other factors may come into play like need for money to support family and relatives. Or gives a credit to a relative or friend who needs to make a trip, but can’t afford the fare.
As time passes, the employee rationalizes that the Big corporation won’t miss the money. Things get out of hand and the situation snowballs when others approach for favors and threaten to “Drop a Dime” if the employee doesn’t cooperate. Others at work get suspicious and eventually call the company hotline.
I’ve seen some of the perpetrators relieved that the situation is over with; the pressure is off. The real hurt is the employee ends up with a criminal record and loss of any gainful employment in the future.
No win situation for all involved.
They go back to the earliest days of SW: “Green Pass”, NRMR, non-revenue, must ride is good anywhere, anytime on SW system. “Red Pass” “SA”, reservations not allowed. Each SW employee who dealt with the public had a couple, if they saw a passenger doing a special favor, e.g., pushing a wheelchair for somebody they didn’t know, they learned the details, “On behalf of SW Air, we’d like to invite you back for another trip, anywhere SW flies.” Every employee got a couple “Red Passes” every month, much the same, except SA. Each of them had a unique number, employee supposed to write their name, ID number, and the name of the person who got it. Herb sent me a couple Green Passes most years, along with his famed scathing note telling me how dumb I was, what a loser, so incompetent he felt sorry for me ’cause I’d never have enough money to fly his fine airline. First time it made mad, “Oh, that’s just Herb, means he likes you!” Definitely not in any how-to book, but after all these years I’m smiling at the memory.
I had a similar experience with American Airlines. Received 4 vouchers because of covid was told we could use them whenever we were ready to travel. When we tried to use them we were told they had already been used. We couldn’t figure how that was possible since we did not use them. After reading this article now I know. American Airlines was like thank you for informing us and sorry for the inconvenience. They were no help, it was very frustrating.
Crazy. At STL on July 5th, we were shorted a drink voucher by a male at the outdoor check-in. We even joked that the guy probably kept it. I can’t believe that when I started reading this article it actually said St. Louis. I’m pretty sure one of those is ours.
@James Ksiezak “I wonder how many other rogue SWA employees there are who are stealing from the company which eats into the company’s profits which in turn makes SWA resort to reserved seating.” Now, you’re making me like this guy.
@Paper Boarding Pass. This is why police forces, intelligence agencies, etc. do training on this. Otherwise honest people get roped into doing what seems like a harmless act that starts a cascade.
There is an easy way to fix this sort of problem and it is * Firing* the Stupid SOB thief Immediately
Dont hire crooks.
@David: I’ve been reading the blog long enough to have seen Gary accused of hating every major US airline.
His real issue is the onlyfans account promotion.
SWA created this mess after Herb left. Culture went out the window and employees who used to care just punch a clock now. It got so bad that sups were picking on the weaker agents and one in OKC had enough and did one in from a snipers perch. Really sad.
SWA is not at all what you think it is. I have watched them destroy employees lives. The vouchers are a joke. Has anyone ever noticed SWA always gives compensation in the form that goes straight back to SWA and is basically smoke and mirrors. SWA is excellent at gaslighting. They can tell folks to **** off and people will think they are getting a compliment.
These employees are just asking for it. All Southwest has to do to catch them is log into the Windows 3.1 main server, export a spreadsheet of compensation records, open it in Lotus 1-2-3, and do a little poking around.