Can someone please tell me if this flight ticket is actually genuine

Question

Can someone please tell me if this ticket is genuine. I met someone online and they were due to fly to the uk. But she claimed that she had COVID so wasn't able to board the plane

Is this real?

Answer 1

This boarding pass is fake. Many details are off, but the most glaring red flag is that flight UA2704 last flew on August 31st from Philadephia to Chicago. It did not fly on September 27th, and it certainly did not fly from San Francisco to London.

Other suspicious to impossible items:

• Boarding passes like this are given out at the check-in counter. If they had such a bad case of COVID that they could not fly, they would not have gotten one.
• International United flights at SFO use the G gates, not the C gates.
• Font sizes are all over the place, with the "SFO-LHR" and "SAN FRANCISCO TO LONDON" labels particularly sus.
• Boarding begins at 11:10P and ends at 11:20P! That's some mighty efficient 10 minute boarding for an intercontinental flight.
• The arrival time does not make sense: there's an 8 hr time difference between SFO and LHR, and the flight takes 10:30, but 10:55 AM LHR would be 1:55 AM PT, only 3 hours after departure.

Answer 2

It’s a decent fake, but still relatively obvious to anybody who knows what to look for.

• First and foremost, the story is impossible. If the individual could not fly due to COVID, they would not have been issued a boarding pass in the first place. Either they were sufficiently incapacitated that they could not have made it to the airport, or they failed to meet entry requirements for the UK due to COVID. In the first case they couldn’t have been issued a paper boarding pass simply because they couldn’t check in properly. In the second case, United would have rejected the check-in due to failing entry requirements for the destination (this is true of any legitimate airline, not just United, if you can’t prove you’re allowed to enter a country, they won’t let you on a flight to that country, period). More generically, paper boarding passes are only issued starting at most 8-12 hours prior to boarding time for the first leg of a flight itinerary, and only for the direction of the itinerary (IOW, you can’t get all your boarding passes for a round trip on the day of departure), and you must pass all check-in requirements and be physically present at the airport to receive one. If somebody is presenting a paper boarding pass and claiming they couldn’t make the flight due to something that would be confirmed on check-in (this includes both wellness and all required document checks), they are almost certainly lying.
• The ticket number in the bottom left is the e-ticket number on United boarding passes, but the prefix is wrong. United Airlines has the prefix 016. As far as I can tell, 847 is assigned to West Air, which is a Chinese airline. Note that this is not an easy thing to check online, but if you can find the info, it’s something that is very frequently overlooked by scammers. In this case I happened to know the United prefix simply because I fly on United with some regularity, but had to look up what airline 847 is a prefix for and am still not sure that what I found is correct.
• While United does fly SFO to LHR, the current flight numbers are UA 901 and UA 930. UA 2704 has not flown since August and was a domestic route within the US (between PHL and ORD). Cross-checking flight numbers like this is also a very easy check to make online, and it is interestingly also something a lot of scammers do not get right.
• SFO does not have a gate C16. Listing nonexistent gates is not something I’ve seen many scammers do, probably because this is trivial to check online for almost any reasonably large airport.
• The boarding time, departure time, arrival time, seat number, and gate number are all perfectly parallel to the top and bottom of the image, but the boarding pass itself is not. All of these have been very clearly edited in after the fact. The ‘San Francisco to London’ part is also not aligned correctly, though it’s not as blatant as the other parts. This is overall a bit subtle unless you know what to look for, but it is almost always present to some extent on images of boarding passes that were modified after the picture was taken.
• Aside from the alignment, the fonts are horrendously inconsistent. The confirmation number in the bottom left is too large, the ‘Economy’ bit under the seat number is far too bold, the gate closure, departure, and arrival times are far too light, etc. All of this is also
• 10 minutes for boarding is impossible for any wide body long-haul airframe, and such an airframe would be required for a a route between SFO and LHR. This says to me that the person faking the boarding pass was lazy more than anything else (it’s not hard for to figure this bit out if you do a bit of searching).
• The actual flight time for SFO to LHR is usually about 10.5 hours, but the ticket shows a flight time of only 3.5 (or 27.5) hours if you correctly account for the eight hour time difference. Departure and arrival times are essentially always local time at the origin and destination airports, so this looks really suspicious.
• Even if gate SFO gate C16 did exist, international flights on United originating from SFO depart from the G gates, not the C gates. Things do get shuffled sometimes, but it’s highly improbable that it would be moved between concourses and not just gates on the same concourse. Like ticket number prefixes, this is something that is not exactly easy to look up online, though it’s more just a matter of being tedious than anything else (most airports will indicate somewhere online which gates are assigned to which carriers and which are international versus domestic, but it’s not always there and often takes some digging to find).
• United appears to currently only fly B777-200s for UA 901 and UA 930. These do not have a seat 23D in economy with United’s seating layout, and even if they did it could not be a window seat given the seating layout. The choice of airframe for a given route is not difficult to look up online (for example, FlightAware lists this info alongside individual flights, so a quick check there can often tell you what has been used for recent flights), though the seat layout for a given airline on a given airframe is unfortunately not.
• The boarding pass lists boarding group 1, which is not possible with United for a long-haul flight on a wide body airframe on an economy ticket unless the passenger has high frequent flyer status, but such status is not listed. The Premier Access is also a bit suspect due to the lack of listed frequent flier status, but is technically possible (it’s possible to buy Premier Access as an add-on on at least some United itineraries, but doing so is a huge waste of money for a single-leg non-stop flight). This part also largely comes down to personal knowledge of the airline since I fly United with some regularity.

Answer 3

A fake, but a decent one. It's likely a photo of real boarding pass with some details photo-shopped.

Some pointers here

1. Typically international itineraries have INTL in big letters printed on the top right corner of the main ticket (left of the cut line)
2. Flyer has UA frequency flyer number but no status and it's an economy ticket but they still have Premier Access and Boarding Group 1.
3. On almost all United planes 23D is an aisle seat . In fact currently United only operates B777-200 on SFO->LHR and these have no seat 23D at all.
4. It looks like the flight number UA2704 was assigned to the route from Chicago to Philadelphia and has been discontinued in August.

It looks like someone put some real effort into forging this, which takes a skill, determination, and malice. I would proceed with extreme caution as this is a sign of a professional scammer.

Answer 4

To add to the previous answers, which analyze the details on the pass itself:

Based on the story you provide, this is fake. A boarding pass can be issued in two ways:

• If the passenger uses online check-in (typically 24 hours before the flight), they can get a boarding pass on their phone or for printing at home on regular paper. It does not look like the special "boarding pass" paper here.
• If the passenger checks in or uses a kiosk at the airport, they'll get a boarding pass that looks like the one in your photo. But your contact claims not to have gone to the airport, so the story does not add up.