Just came across an email from United that said:
Originally Posted by United.com email
Your MileagePlus® account information has been updated
Hi ______,
We wanted to let you know your MileagePlus® account information has changed. For your security, we can’t specify exactly what was updated, but it may include your address, phone number, password or other details.
If you recently changed information in your MileagePlus account, you can disregard this message.
If you didn’t change information in your MileagePlus account, you should review your account information to see what’s changed or contact the MileagePlus Service Center
This email came about several hours after making two regular paid United bookings for domestic US flights for the member and a travel companion using a major OTA.
I was then asked to look into the matter, and it seems that the UA MP member's account profile was unilaterally -- and without member's approval or prior awareness -- updated to mark the account as that of a "female" despite the person having only ever been male and having a very common first name for males. When we were going in to update the account profile for gender (to set it as male) and add a title, United spits back that they want to verify the personal info and ask for documentation of change of name/gender/DOB using former and current ID info. Obviously, when a person's name, gender and DOB have never changed, there is no way to document a change. So we send in current government-issued ID, and then United kicks back "confirmation" that it's an "account complex name change" and an additional email should come from UA within two weeks indicating whether or not the "account was able to be updated based on the information provided". But there is no name change by the member -- at least not in decades as far as we can tell. There is just a new loading of a title and a correction of the gender, all so as to make the gender match the common male first name and mark the gender as male (as the member's gender had been since birth on all documentation and all travel history and other documentation ever submitted to the federal government).
Was it United which made the weird gender change to the account in order to force a submission of MileagePlus member's government-issue ID? Ordinarily, gender and title changes shouldn't be a problem to change on the UA profile when the names and DOB remain as they have been from the start. I would be surprised if it wasn't UA that made the change without member approval. Anyone else on FT observe this kind of thing happening to a MileagePlus account?