How a Man “Hacked” Indigo’s Website to Find His Lost Luggage

Nandan Kumar, a software engineer, decided to take matters into his own hands after not receiving help from Indigo.

Nandan Kumar, man who hacked Indigo's website to find his lost luggage.

(Image: The Quint)

Airlines and misplaced luggage are a tale as old as time, and if you're a frequent traveller, you must have encountered a time when your luggage got exchanged or lost while travelling. If so, you might also know that talking to customer service to resolve this issue is nothing short of a headache, but it's one thing that needs to be done. Well, for most people.

Nandan Kumar, a software engineer flying from Patna to Bombay decided to take matters into his own hands after receiving no help from Indigo's customer service. His luggage got replaced with another passenger on the same flight.

"I realised it only after I reached home when my wife pointed out that the bag seems to be a different from ours as we don’t use key based locks in our bags," he wrote in his Twitter thread.

He tried to connect with the customer service of Indigo, who tried to connect him with the other passenger, but none of it worked. Finally, he decided to find the user by himself by "hacking" Indigo's website.

He explained how he did this in the thread and wrote, "My dev instinct kicked in and I pressed the F12 button on my computer keyboard and opened the developer console on the @IndiGo6E website and started the whole checkin flow with network log record on."

He finally found the passenger's contact details in one of the network responses. He called this his "hacker moment".

Nandan mentioned that he tried to look for the passenger's contact details by going through Indigo's website first, but couldn't find anything.

He was able to contact the passenger through this, and since they lived in close proximity, the quickly met up at a central point and exchanged their luggage. They did all of this without the airline's help, and Nandan has made sure to leave some suggestions for Indigo.

He asked the airline to fix their IVR, make customer service better, and most important of all: to fix their website since it leaks sensitive customer data.

He ends his thread by saying that the customer service representative claimed that they called the other co-passenger thrice. However, when Nandan asked the co-passenger if this was true, they said that they hadn't received any calls from Indigo.

Since the incident has gone viral on social media, the airline too has responded to Nandan in a statement.

They claim to have tracked back and found that Nandan selected the wrong option to retrieve his luggage instead of doing to a separate page dedicated to resolving the issue. They have taken note of his feedback and also said that they will review it.