Regardless of whether you travel once a week, once a month, once a year or once a decade, you’ll still sometimes learn something about traveling that you didn’t know before. Maybe it’s how to override hotel thermostat settings, or why seats on a plane are usually blue. Perhaps it’s the best question you could ever ask your hotel concierge or finding out what that little triangle on a plane really means.
I was “today years old” when I learned about the term “ghost bagging.” As in “ghost bagging at an airport.” And what’s more, my husband had never heard of it, and I thought he knew everything about travel, LOL!
What Is Ghost Bagging?
Ghost bagging is when a bag is checked onto a flight but its accompanying passenger is not.
Why Do People Use Ghost Bagging?
Most often it’s done as a way to smuggle or simply transport things – drugs, credit cards, cash, forged IDs, brand new items (or counterfeits that look like brand-new items) from one place to another. At least once it was done for even more nefarious reasons, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Typically, someone will make a flight reservation using a fake name, along with a matching fake ID. They’ll go to the airport and check in, and leave their luggage at the baggage drop…and then leave the airport.
The bag, meanwhile, is sent on to its final destination, where it’s picked up by whoever is supposed to take the luggage. From there, the contents are distributed to whoever, for whatever…drug traffickers, people who plan to commit fraud by returning “new” clothing for refunds, and other illegal activities.
Examples of Ghost Bagging Cases
- In June, 2023 the feds got involved with a drug trafficking ring after several bags with no owner were discovered in Phoenix
- 3 women were arrested at Nashville International Airport in November, 2023, after Southwest Airlines reported discovering a bag that had arrived at the airport with no owner.
- In November 2022, a Detroit resident was sentenced to 10-1/2 years in prison after he ghost bagged luggage from 2015-2018 between Arizona and Detroit (he was later released due to questionable content during his trial).
- It’s believed that the bomb that exploded on board Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 was the work of ghost bagging. The NYC-bound flight blew up and crashed over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing 270 people in total, after a group of terrorists were said to have placed a bomb in a checked bag. However, they weren’t on the flight — the perpetrators only checked the bag with the timed bomb inside and never boarded the plane.
PC: Amanda Slater // flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0
Why Don’t Airlines Catch These Bags Without Owners?
After the Lockerbie incident, security agencies upped their game to screen checked bags for explosives, weapons and other items that potentially could be dangerous. And if it’s an international flight, connecting the bag with “its person” is usually required.
However, if it’s a domestic flight, particularly in the U.S., things are more lax. Even though airlines don’t want “bags without people” on their flights, not all airlines require a passenger to be on a domestic flight for their bag to be put on the plane. On top of that, airlines and airports rarely ask people who are picking up bags on the carousel to show proof that the bag is theirs. And the carousels are on the non-secure side of the airport, so anyone from outside could conceivably grab a bag, and no one would be the wiser.
That being said, if there’s a bag with no owner on their carousel, airlines may get the law involved if they feel the bag is there for potential ghost bagging purposes vs. it being a bag that was mishandled and sent to the wrong destination by the airline.
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2 comments
Does the ghost bagger cancel the ticket after they check their bag? I know on domestic flights they don’t care as much if the bag doesn’t fly with the passenger, but if the passenger is a no show, wouldn’t the gate agent notice the missing passenger checked a bag? Gate agents are probably more focused on getting the flight out on time but still seems like the bag could get flagged at that point.
In Israel there is no such a thing.
Only after “Boarding Completed” are the luggage loaded on the aircraft.
No show? No luggage loaded!