Originally Posted by
cornfedcowboy
This was my question too. Sounds like someone got a stack of passes either from the printer or an agent working the club. My passes have serial numbers. It would be easy to verify if they had been used. Something doesn't pass the smell test.
Ok, so let's say the pass has already been used.
Which person did the pass actually belong to - the person who used it first, or the person who is using it now?
Originally Posted by
Superguy
At any rate, I fail to see why this is a huge deal. UA may not like it, but it's certainly not illegal (or *cough* fraudulent) as they try to make it out to be.
But it could very well be fraudulent. We don't know where these sellers are getting 500+ passes. It could be:
- They are grabbing them at the printer
- They are grabbing them after redemption
- They are counterfeiting them
In the first case, United may know what serial numbers are missing, and flag it whenever one of them is scanned. If the person says they got the pass from someone, they'll want to know who they got it from.
In the second case, agents may not actually be scanning passes in in the first place, and then reselling them later. Or, agents may be grabbing already-scanned passes, in which case the person who bought them will show trying to scan a pass that's already scanned.
If they're counterfeit, that could be because someone has some small number of passes and keeps reusing the same "serial numbers", or it could be because someone knows how United picks the serial numbers, and is printing their OWN passes with valid serial numbers that are on other people's passes.
In the latter case, I might receive a pass straight from Chase, go to the Lounge, use my pass, and have it come up as already used because the eBay seller has printed a fake pass with my serial number on it.
Then the agent will want to ask me where I got my pass, because if I *DID* get it from someone with a valid Chase card, they may want to let me in even though the pass has scanned as used.
Anyway, my guess is that these passes are not really legitimate passes, and United has ways of flagging them as such, and thus the interrogation.
But even if they are legitimate, United absolutely has a motivation to prevent their sale/trade/barter - they simply don't want ANY market for these passes, because once there is a market for them, the incentive for people to make fake ones increases substantially.
Put another way, if sale is prohibited, anyone selling them is doing something negarious, and you go after anyone selling them. If sale is not prohibited, it's a lot harder to weed out the "legitimate" sellers from the potential frauds.