Two passengers exchanged luggage without realizing it. When one of the victims realized the error and went to complain to the IndiGo airline, he was treated with indolence. Angered by the mistreatment, he took advantage of his knowledge to recover his belongings.
The victim was Nandan Kumar and his journey began on the airport conveyor belt, when a man who mistakenly mistook his luggage for a traveler on the same flight and, what a coincidence, I had a suitcase identical to yours.
When the company refused to help him track down the other victim’s address, Kumar decided to fix the problem on his own.
It was so decided to hack the airline’s website to obtain the information of the other involved and thus, contact him directly to recover his belongings.
Nandan Kumar, 28, lives in Bangalore, India and is a software engineer. In his favor, he assures that he is not a professional hacker. She simply found it necessary to “do something” to retrieve her suitcase.
On his Twitter profile, this software developer explained that when he arrived at the airport baggage carousel, another traveler on the same flight took his bag without any bad intentions.
In a thread of tweets he explains the whole story, assuring that the luggage of both passengers was “exactly the same with some small differences”.
Arriving home, his wife realized that it was someone else’s luggage and that’s when she called IndiGo customer service.
Kumar explains that the company did not make it easy for him to contact this passenger due to privacy and data protection issues. The next day, seeing that the call he had been promised from IndiGo never came, decided to fix it on their own.
The method
“After all the failed attempts by legal means, my developer instinct kicked in and I pressed the F12 button on my computer keyboard and opened the developer console for the IndiGo website.”
It was then that Kumar assures that “in one of the responses from the network, there was the passenger’s phone number and email.”
Someone took Kumar’s suitcase by mistake. Photo Bloomberg
The developer took note of the data and contacted the person by phone, thus recovering his luggage. I don’t try steal or modify any airline information.
And although his actions were not entirely honest, since he violated a company’s website. Kumar indicated that the airline’s confidential information was not encrypted.
To end the thread, Kumar posted: “Dear IndiGo, take note: 1. Fix your IVR and make it more user friendly, 2. Make your customer service more proactive than reactive, 3. Your website leaks data confidential, fix it.”
In addition, the young man assures that “when I asked my travel companion if he had received any calls from IndiGo, he denied it”, when the airline assured him that they had called this passenger on up to three occasions.