A federal jury has found a 35-year-old man who was posing as a flight attendant guilty of wire fraud and entering a secure area of an airport under false pretenses.
Court proceedings showed that the man, Tiron Alexander of Florida, repeatedly booked free flights on an airline’s website that were only for flight attendants and pilots. The scheme was carried out from 2018 to 2024, during which Alexander booked 34 flights with one airline in particular, which court documents show was Spirit Airlines, according to The Washington Post.
Alexander took advantage of a process in which flight attendants and pilots can bid for free flights online to falsely claim that he was a flight attendant entitled to so-called “non-revenue fares.” It’s a common industry practice that flight attendants and pilots can fly for free on the carriers that employ them, as well as on competing airlines.
In order to bid for the free flights, Alexander followed an online process that asks non-revenue travelers to list whether they are a pilot or flight attendant, which airline they work for, their date of hire, and their employee badge number. Officials say that Alexander claimed he worked for seven different airlines, with 30 different badge numbers and dates of hire.
However, he still needed to provide his real name and date of birth for each flight in order to get a boarding pass.
“That information is how he was ultimately caught, with his fraudulently secured flights piling up in Spirit’s log books until it was large enough for the airline to take notice,” according to court documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Aside from the 34 flights on Spirit Airlines, he posed as a flight attendant on three other airlines and fraudulently booked a total of more than 120 free flights. The case was investigated by the TSA and prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida. Alexander is set to be sentenced on August 25.
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