Six men have been charged with stealing millions of airline frequent flier miles, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Erin Nealy Cox announced Monday.
A federal grand jury indicted 43-year-old Wojciech Borkowski of Zgierz, Poland; 51-year-old Terran Oliver of Allen, TX; 55-year-old Semaj Lee of Oklahoma City, OK; 49-year-old Derrick Booker Spencer, OK; 30-year-old Yusuf Siddique of Folsom, CA; and 42-year-old Stanley Benton of Los Angeles, CA on conspiracy to commit wire fraud in August 2019.
The lead defendant, Borkowski, was arrested in Poland in May 2020.
Borkowski was taken into FBI custody on Friday morning, and extradited from Warsaw to Dallas over the weekend. He made his initial appearance before Magistrate Judge Renee Harris Toliver on Monday.
According to the indictment, Borkowski allegedly hacked into consumers’ airline miles accounts and used the compromised accounts to book flights for unsuspecting passengers who had purchased travel through Oliver, Lee, Booker, Siddique, and Benton, the other five defendants in the case.
The passengers would send their requested itinerary and personal information to one of the five men who would then send the information and a money order to Borkowski, the indictment alleges.
Borkowski would allegedly book the passenger’s flight with fraudulently obtained miles and send the payment reference number back to one of the other five defendants, who would transmit the number to the passenger to generate a boarding pass, the indictment states.
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According to Cox, the conspiracy involved the loss of millions of earned airline miles.
