Originally Posted by DYKWIA

When I've done upgrade at the airport, they normally just take the Skywards number. I wonder what extra checks are performed to check that the number given is correct, and belongs to the passenger attempting to use the points?

If it's just a case of eyeballing the names to see if they are the same, then maybe it just happened to be a similar name, or the agent skipped the step? So, they could have typed the wrong number by mistake.

I doubt the agents will be able to trawl through Skywards accounts looking for persons with a large number of points, so I think you can rule out it being somebody from EK. It would be immediately apparent who had process the bookings, so not something they could hide.