DCAFly

The doe-eyed ingenue bit only goes so far. I find it hard to believe someone is gullible enough to fall for a scam like this. Lord, even my 86 year old mother wouldn't fall for this.

Gig103

A bit of a Devil's Advocate to this point... Is it up to this lady to know the rules for employee discount tickets? How am I, the purchaser, supposed to know if AC rules permit employees to sell re-tickets? I bet every airline has different intricacies in terms of who is allowed to travel with and when.



I say the employee was the one taking the risk with his/her career it sounds like, so just fire them, ban this lady, and move on.

yyznomad

From what I understood reading the article, the WeChat fraudster wasn't an employee. The fraudster used "employee discount" as a guise. At least, that's how I understand it.

rankourabu

I really dont see a big deal here... Banned from AC? ok... boo hoo... like its the only airline in the world that flies to China?

The repayment is another issue. AC is reaching here, and how do they propose collecting this?
Shouldnt they go after the person that bought the tickets with a stolen credit card in the first place?

Gig103

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh. That makes more sense than an actual employee selling their benefits. But c'mon then, it was just normal CC fraud and should be between AC, Visa, and their investigators and insurance. Sometimes "too good to be true" can be true; I paid $2200 to Orbitz for a DL business class flight + 7 nights in a Prague 4* hotel. Normally it's approx $5500 for just J flights TATL from Phoenix, but I happened upon a deal. Yes that's an OTA I've heard of, but I've also an unknown TA to get 50% off a hotel (found via Trivago) and that was legit too.

RangerNS

Bohemian1

if it looks too good to be true ....

But there's lots of people out there who are always looking for some kind of angle and a corresponding group happy to oblige and take their money. There's some pretty shady dealings on things like WhatsApp & WeChat.

I wonder how long it was going to be before she paid for a ticket and never got anything in return?

StuckInYYZ

Something to consider... in China, this would not be a second look type thing... People buy things for others using their benefits all the time. It happens here too (although less often). How many times have we seen "Hey, your SO works at [INSERT TV COMPANY HERE]... I'm finishing my mancave... can you set me up with an 80" TV?" Buying something so expensive from a stranger worries me, but I could see it...

As for through wechat, it's no different from us and ebay or Amazon. Did she take the usual precautions (eg, verified account, customer testimonials), we'll never know. wechat does require a valid phone number to create an account... not sure if it would help investigators or not.

One thing that is curious though... is AC going through the forensic data (eg, buyer's IP address) to track things down? If they were serious, they would have engaged the (alleged) victim after hearing her side and at least trying to identify the fraudster (who will likely attempt this again with another victim(s). Letting her tip off the fraudster seems very amateurish... I would suspect that AC has a substantial fraud/crime investigation team.

Or they were being lazy about it.

Doesn't justify what the victim did, but also doesn't excuse AC.

As I mentioned above, we're thinking about this from a "western" point of view. Agreed this is something we don't see very often, but with the chinese apps coming into play here, I suspect this is just the first of many... I'm seeing Unionpay/wechat pay and alipay show up more and more in the stores here. I'm sure all these pay processors would be interested in participating in investigations... reputational risk and all.

I'm not sure how she would be able to identify the person as an AC employee or not. Also some of the nuances of the english language don't translate too well into chinese (eg, you go into some of the malls here in the GTA and you see posters proclaiming employee-price sales...doesn't help with the confusion).

As for post-secondary institutes, there are a few... Culinary Arts School of Ontario (Private).... Centennial College has whole food programs.... I think Humber as well.

Deporting her, not likely. This is a civil matter. Unless they are going to accuse her of fraud over $5000 (although now that this is in public with a story, much harder to do this).

I would agree that the idiom(?) If it's too good to be true... but I can see this easily happening. I do think that Air Canada bungled this though. Instead of going after the potential fraudster (and likely source of more), they just went after the end user. As BlondeBomber said, it makes them look like bullies. With their resources (and Tencent's resources), I'm pretty sure they could have gone after the fraudster and caught them. It isn't in either's best interests to just go after the "endpoint" victim.

yyznomad

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with you...
Just telling you how I understood it.

The Lev

I suppose none of you guys have ever fallen for this fraud:
https://www.sherwoodford.ca/blog/whe...loyee-pricing/

mapleg

Haggling down airline tickets is not a cultural thing in Asia. As for using websites to buy and sell items of a dubious nature, those are ubiquitous globally.

yyznomad

Yep. And once in awhile you will read in the daily local or national news about people such as the elderly getting scammed by phone fraudsters or whatever.
It. Happens. All. The. Time.
And. There. Will. Always. Be. Someone. Falling. For It.

mapleg

Come on now. I really hope your posting was tongue in cheek and not serious.

So called employee pricing on automobiles is a marketing gimmick well advertised on legitimate media and at dealerships. If you can't figure out the difference between that and buying "special" tickets on Wechat, then there's not much more I can say.

StuckInYYZ

Haggling is common in Asia. Depending on the product you can even go down to 20%. In touristy areas, many if not most prices are hyper inflated. Although personally, for a commercially available product, this would tingle my spidey-senses... And I don't fly anywhere near the amount most of you do. 10% or maybe 20% off, but not 50% for a plane ticket in J... but then again, I would also have done enough research against multiple airlines/flights to know if the price is too far off the mark.

Often1

She transacted fraudulently-issued tickets. So, she owes AC. It is up to her to collect the money from the original seller. Until she pays what she owes, AC will not throw good money after bad.

Seems simple and doesn't require an analysis of what she knew and when.

Good on AC. This isn't petty fraud and the cost is ultimately carried by honest passengers.