A baggage smuggling scam has landed some honest travelers in jail.
At least 17 international travelers have been caught up in a bag tag-switching scam designed to smuggle contraband, including illegal drugs, across international borders. Canada’s CTV News published a multi-part series on corruption at Canadian airports last month, and the revelation that the passengers had unwittingly been roped into a drug smuggling scheme was among the takeaways.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have arrested six baggage and ramp workers at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport in connection with the alleged bag tag switching. Several of the passengers were detained or arrested in Canada and overseas on suspicion of drug smuggling when bags containing large quantities of drugs were found tagged with their name and reservation number.
Passengers involved had traveled or intended to travel on flights to the Dominican Republic, France, Germany, Morocco, Bermuda, the Philippines, and South Korea.
The passengers involved told CTV they had checked their bags, and were later detained before leaving Canada or at their destinations when officials found the drugs during screening procedures.
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In one case, a passenger en route to New Zealand was detained after she boarded her transpacific connecting flight at Vancouver International Airport. Although she maintained the bag she was shown wasn’t hers, she was arrested and held overnight. She was released without explanation the following morning, and she deduced that local investigators had reviewed footage of check-in at Toronto and were able to determine she had checked a different bag at the ticket counter.
When she arrived in New Zealand, her real bag was in a separate area with “rush” tags—typically used by airlines to reroute delayed or missing luggage—attached.
The scheme, CTV reported, involved baggage handlers who would remove bag tags from a legitimate passenger’s bags and put it on bags containing drugs they wanted to smuggle. Those bags were equipped with trackers so they could be retrieved by local smugglers at their destination. If the bags were intercepted, it would be the passenger on the stolen bag tag that would be identified as the bag’s owner. It’s expected that far more passengers were unwitting victims of successful drug trafficking efforts.
CTV also spoke with three Canadians who had been arrested in the Dominican Republic, and were stuck there for months, even after authorities determined the bags bearing their original bag tags did not belong to them.
The passengers interviewed said they now take a number of steps to protect themselves from the scam repeating when they travel. They take pictures of their bags at the airport, with the bag tag and numbers clearly visible, so they have photographic evidence of what their originally tagged bag looks like. They also take photo or video of their bag being weighed, in case the bag is opened and additional items are added.
Passengers can also use an airline app to check the bag tags that have been issued on their reservation, and should alert airline personnel immediately if they notice an extra bag tag linked to their reservation. If airline staff erroneously print an extra bag tag at check-in, passengers can request that staff destroy the tags while they watch to ensure they can’t be used on another bag. Lastly, passengers should take care never to check a bag that isn’t secured by a TSA-accessible lock.
Some victims of the scam also said they had been able to show authorities where their real bags were because they were using electronic luggage trackers.
In another story in the series, CTV found evidence of organized crime operating airside at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. A worker at the airport told CTV there were gaps in security on the worker entry points. The worker said he had worked at the airport for over two decades, but had only once been subject to a random search.