This is a scam, right?
 

Found someone on CL looking to give away/sell eUpgrade credits. Only catch, he said to upgrade me he needs my booking reference number.

Beware people, if you give someone your reference number, they can cancel your flight and potentially credit the refund back to a different account!

Fraud alert!

In fairness, not that he should be doing this, he does need your reference number to upgrade you.

To cancel a flight, don't you need the credit card number you booked with after you log-in to the reservation online?

If you call in to AC reservation, they only ask for your name (probably not even ask, but simply saying "Mr. John Doe?"). If you tell them to cancel PNR and that you will hold on to the etkt number for later use, they'll do it in 15 seconds. I'm always surprised how lax the airline industry is.

For pranksters, yes it's surprisingly easy to cancel other people's PNR. However trying to get refund on a different credit card number will probably raise a red flag.

You do need the booking reference to upgrade the flight. As far as I know, there is no way that someone else can have the value of the ticket credited to their account if you give them your booking reference. All that happens is that the value of the flight can be accessed through the same booking reference and for most non-refundable fares thaht means the same passenger has to be booked. I haven't cancelled a T or T+ ticket in a while, but that's how I understand it. For a refundable ticket, the value of the ticket goes back to the original cc. I don't see the problem.

As others note, someone else can cancel your flight, which would be a rather malicious thing to do.

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Happened to lucky before:
http://boardingarea.com/blogs/onemileatatime/2011/06/01/someone-decided-to-cancel-my-tickets-remember-to-protect-your-travel-plans/

So you do have to watch out who gets ahold if your PNR, unless you call and put a password on it. I believe all credits have to be used by the name of the person on the ticket so less danger from people ripping you off.

Nonref tickets cannot be cashed, of course, and the passenger name cannot change. Very hard, if not impossible, to credit another cc account in the case of refundable tickets. IME, it never happened; I was never allowed, likely to avoid problems like this.

The T&C of eUpgrades forbid reselling. Your CL guy is offside, perhaps a tad entrepreneurial as well. From ac.com:

"eUpgrade Credits are not redeemable for cash or other consideration and may not be bartered or sold.
Air Canada will consider void any eUpgrade Credits that have been bartered or sold. Air Canada reserves the right to terminate the Top Tier privileges of members who sell or barter their eUpgrade Credits."

When I saw the thread title, I expected the topic would be Aeroscam (TM).

Seriously though, one would hope AC gets someone to give this guy a booking reference, and from there, catches the guy and cancels his account.

One reason we suffer ever more hoops from AC is these jerks.