Man hacks into IndiGo website to retrieve his lost luggage, shares his story on Twitter

The time one has to spend to collect their luggage from the conveyor belt after a flight is extremely frustrating. But it becomes even worse when one simply can’t locate their luggage after a long time of waiting.

Something similar happened with Nandan Kumar, a software engineer travelling from Patna to Bangalore on an IndiGo flight. Kumar’s luggage was mistakenly picked up by a co-passenger and the incident snowballed into a larger scenario that prompted Kumar to use his developer skills for good.

Kumar shared his story on Twitter on how he retrieved his luggage while also pointing out the flaws in the security of the IndiGo website.

“So, I travelled from PAT - BLR from indigo 6E-185 yesterday. And my bag got exchanged with another passenger. Honest mistake from both our ends. As the bags were exactly the same with some minor differences,” Kumar wrote in the tweet.

Kumar then called the customer care number and followed all protocols to locate his lost luggage.

“Long story short, I couldn't get any resolution on the issue. And neither your customer care team was ready to provide me with the contact details of the person, citing privacy and data protection,” Kumar mentioned.

Interestingly, he didn’t receive any call from any customer care agent even the next day.

“After all the failed attempts, 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 check-in flow with network log record on,” he wrote.

For all the non-techie readers, when you press F12, it opens a set of developer tools that helps engineers look at requests and responses sent and received to and from a website server.

Kumar then successfully located the co-passenger and exchanged his bag. He also shared a list of security flaws addressing IndiGo to look into them.

IndiGo responded with a note claiming that they were sorry for the inconvenience caused and assured that the website had no security lapses.

The tweet thread has amassed over 5,000 likes and many reactions. People totally supported Kumar and shared their experiences with the airline.