A woman went viral for using an Apple AirTag to track down her luggage after United Airlines supposedly lost her bag and lied about its whereabouts.
To close out 2022, Valerie Szybala enjoyed her first international trip in years, but the fun swiftly ended when she landed at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on December 28 without her luggage.
She claimed she was informed via the United Airlines app that her bag wouldn’t make it to Washington D.C. until the following day and opted to have the luggage delivered to her house because “the airport was a madhouse,” she told CNN.
The disinformation research analyst had taken precautions to prepare for this increasingly common issue and purchased an Apple AirTag to keep tabs on her bag.
“I’d heard that it was a thing,” Szybala said of placing tracking devices in luggage. “I had a layover scheduled, so I knew the potential for the bag to get lost was high.”
According to Szybala, the AirTag showed that the bag did make its way to Washington D.C. on December 29 as United Airlines had promised her — but it didn’t make it to Szybala.
The worried United Airlines customer continued to try to get a hold of the airline for several days but alleged she was placed on lengthy hold times to speak to a representative over the phone and online chats.
“I was trying to contact them every day but the hold time on the phone was incredible, I never made it, and through the chat on the app the wait time was two to four hours,” she said.
“But I did it every day and they were reassuring me that the bag is coming, it’s in our system, it’s safe in our service center, it’ll be delivered tonight. But that was never true.”
Szybala knew where her bag was — and was fairly confident that it wasn’t an official distribution center. Thanks to her AirTag, on December 30, Szybala was able to track her luggage to a residential apartment complex down the street from her home.
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“I’d just like everyone to know that @united has lost track of my bag and is lying about it,” Szybala claimed in a now-viral thread started on January 1 with photos of the supposed emptied bags found by the dumpsters. “My apple AirTag shows that it has been sitting in a residential apartment complex for over a day. Out back by the dumpsters, I have found other emptied United Airlines bags.”
She claims to have found contact information on one of the emptied bags but has not received a reply to her email.
She then shared screenshots claiming to show her conversation with a representative from United Airlines when the person told her to “calm down” insisting that her bag was “safe at the delivery services distribution center” despite being tracked to the apartment building.
“MAJOR UPDATE: for the first time since Friday my AirTag (and hopefully luggage) appears to be on the move… it’s at a McDonalds? The plot thickens…” she tweeted later that day with a screenshot showing the alleged location of her bag.
The bag then supposedly returned home where it was being “held hostage” after the quick snack run. Over the next few days, Szybala claimed to track her suitcase traveling to the suburbs 16 miles out of the city and a shopping mall several times before always returning to the same apartment complex.
Szybala told CNN she filed a police report but could not enlist help from the local police since she couldn’t pinpoint exactly what part of the apartment complex her suitcase was hiding in.
The frustrated flyer returned to the apartments the next day when she saw her bag was tracked there again and connected with a local news crew and a resident of the apartment complex who saw her viral tweets.
“The other bags [by the dumpsters] were gone. The resident who came to help said they’d seen someone taking them inside,” she told CNN.
“After creeping around the building’s garage with a little posse trying to get a signal, I stepped outside for service,” Szybala tweeted, explaining how she received a “sketchy” text from a random number claiming to be from DCA Couriers United.
The delivery person claimed that there had been a mix-up with the luggage, writing that “the issue was that the bag was given to [the driver] under a different passenger and [they] delivered [the] luggage in a different address and had to go back to the place to pick it up.”
Szybala said she was finally reconnected with her lost luggage when she called the delivery driver and met him at his unmarked car in his civilian clothes near the apartment complex. She was happy to discover that her bag was still locked shut with her clothing, souvenirs and AirTag neatly packed away.
“I don’t know that this guy was telling the truth, I suspect he was not,” she said. “Nothing I’ve been told by this guy or @United explains why my bag spent 3 days in an apartment complex garage, with occasional shopping excursions. I’d still like some answers.”
United Airlines told CNN: “The service our baggage delivery vendor provided does not meet our standards and we are investigating what happened to lead to this service failure.”
Szybala tweeted that she received 10,000 miles from the airlines but believes it’s “pretty stingy” considering her situation.
She then made a bold statement on Twitter: “I think that there needs to be some sort of public accounting for what happened. United has told me that they are conducting an internal investigation of the delivery company, Couriers United LLC, but they also told me they would not share the results of this investigation with me. At this point it is in United’s best interest to share the results of the investigation not just with me but with the public.”
“Particularly if — as I suspect — the courier who had my bag in his trunk all weekend was also responsible for those empty bags dumped out back.”
Szybala is grateful that she learned to use an AirTag to track her belongings, but some people have been caught using the devices in unsafe ways as an alarming amount of people have been found using AirTags to stalk or rob people.