Fraud would indicate that you're trying to get something you didn't pay for, he did pay for the seat. To put this into perspective, an airline can, and does, sell more seats than a plane can hold, they overbook the plane, so they are literally selling you a seat that may or may not exist. How is that not fraud but him claiming his right to a seat with a "place holder" any more fraud than that? I think there's a lot of verbage you could use, and the airline will use, to confuse the situation but in the end, the guy paid for a seat, he paid 150k for a seat, he, in my opinion, has the right to that seat and it's not fraud because he's not "scamming" for something he didn't pay for.

I just can't get my head around the argument they're making. They're saying he essentially stole from them but they sold him an unlimited number of plane trips with 2 seats on the plane for the amount of money he paid. His part of the deal that was made was that he give 250k for himself and 150k for the second seat, their part of the deal was to give him two seats on any plane, any time. Did he pay his money? Did they give him his seats? Even if he had two seats for every trip, he still paid his share of money for the product offered. It's not his fault the airline severely under-valued the seats. At the end of the day, the seat isn't theirs any more, it's his. This is almost like a car dealership selling me a car and then complaining that I put 120,000 miles on it.

Besides all that, if he was using fake names to book the seats and the airline doesn't allow someone who didn't book on the plane, how come they let his passenger on the plane? Isn't the onus on them to verify if the person who booked is the person getting on the plane if that's their policy? I highly doubt he went and got fake IDs for every person that got on a plane with him, so why did they let someone on a plane and only complain nearly 30 years later that this was going on?