Originally Posted by
Astrophsx
Seems like there may be two UA glitches he took advantage of? The article said he tried to pay them back ~$5k.
Well, he's been accused of several things, ranging from the unethical to the fraudulent.
1) Booking and flying the KIX-ICN via SFO award F trip was probably the most benign of the examples, given that he wasn't URL hacking the website or switching currency or doing anything abnormal to get that fare -- it was an itinerary bookable by anyone. This "award mistake fare" lingered for quite a while (weeks, at least) when he first reported it via a classic FT post, and then resurfaced (at least once) for another few weeks about a year later.
2) He was also accused of excessively complaining to UA in order to get compensation vouchers. I'll let others try to peg the ethics of this -- although certainly you could argue that UA was willingly giving the comp and could/should have stopped giving vouchers for inoperative lights or tray tables at any point if they wanted to (much like DL/NW famously "fired" a frequent complaining customer). Who knows if UA even had the systems in place to track and monitor this kind of activity then.
3) Then, most aggressive on his part was using those compensation vouchers multiple times, exploiting a UA IT glitch that did not immediately cancel the voucher upon use, allowing the value to be applied to multiple tickets if bought within minutes/hours of the initial redemption. This was done knowingly and willfully to exploit the IT glitch and to gain thousands of dollars of value that he was not entitled to. My understanding is that this is what led UA to finally cut him off, and what he tried to offer to repay them for.