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!
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