It wouldn't be the least surprising if the crew's info came from Flyertalk itself in a roundabout way; these sort of rumours have a habit of feeding themselves.

(On a tangent, the best example are countless cases where something is said on Wikipedia without a source, a sloppy journalist/blogger repeats what's in the Wikipedia article.

An editor then comes across the unsourced material, does a Google search, finds the website with the quote and lists that as the source.

And voila, false information which is self perpetuating!)