Joyous vindication for the AI sceptics as Anthropic is shown to be desperate and even fraudulent.

“An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees.”

Subscribe now

Why This Is Mathematically Impossible

• For Anthropic, this $500M would be recorded as $6B in ARR terms.

• Assuming Anthropic’s ARR for April was about $42B:

  • 14% of Anthropic’s revenue and 50% of their M-o-M growth came from a billing error by a customer.

  • The customer unwittingly had become the largest AI token spender in the world.

• Yet Anthropic did not mention this at all. They were extending $500M of credit to a company without telling them.

Why This Is Regulatorily Impossible

• A $500M surprise adverse event in a single month would trigger an 8-K filing with the SEC, highlighting to investors this event of a catastrophic surprise loss.

• If the US still had any regulators, buses of them would be descending on Anthropic and this customer to understand what happened. The Fed, the SEC and the DoJ would be the first of many waves.

Why This Is Organisationally Impossible

• This could only be a post-paid API bill agreement if as described.

• Implicitly without any prior flag to the customer, Anthropic presented $500M for the previous month. The article does not say whether Anthropic told them they were the world’s number 1 AI spender.

• As the bill was paid, the customer made no protest, accepting their own folly for omitting limits

• The AI consultant sounds like a poor one if their expertise did not include enterprise-destroying protections in spend.

• The CFO, the VP of Finance. Many people in that chain would, of course, have to confess to the CEO how this happened, and the CEO would understand that accidents happen, and nobody has been apparently dismissed.

Why the Source Is Impossible

• This is a nuclear secret to this company as they work out how to deal with it. The only people who would know would be:

  • A half dozen of the finance function

  • The CEO

  • The auditors

• Conceivably an MBB-style consultant working with the board.

• Now a fleet of PR / Crisis consultants would have joined.

• The way the quote is written, it sounds like a contractor happened to observe this at one of their many clients.

• The AI consultant who failed to put the use limit on board. Sounds like if anyone was to blame, it would be them, yet they chose to tip off not the FT, nor Bloomberg, they chose Axios.

Why This Is Impossible to Be Run As-is By a Credible Publisher

• The scale of this number in relation to Anthropic revenue, would make this possibly an FTX-level headline event

• The editorial process would have been exhaustive.

  • Source validated.

  • Second source required for publication backing.

  • Legal review.

  • Full editorial review.

  • Right of reply to Anthropic

  • Right of reply to the reckless yet promptly paying customer

• Then swamp the front page and channels.

Why Axios Highlight in the Article they are Not

• The revelation was a bullet point buried, without further commentary of its astonishing implications on corporate governance. Forming a pattern with other analytical conclusions:

• “One CTO told Axios that employees were using AI models to check the weather. That gets expensive fast:”

  • Top models would incur not closet to $0.005 for that. Would get expensive slow.

• Most people default to automating tasks they dislike rather than tasks most valuable to the company,” Sophia Velastegui, CEO of Velastegui Ventures and former chief AI officer at Microsoft”

  • An unsupported truism from a ‘CEO’ of a single person firm, who also never had the prior job cited.

• “Uber’s COO said AI costs are getting “harder to justify.”

  • A total mis-representation of a quote about attribution. No possible honest reading of that interview could conclude the CEO stating the justification was easier before but market dynamics were making it harder.

The Wire (Season 5)

• IYKYK

• This article portrays the values of the publication, which by this read, are atotal disregard for accurately interpreting facts.

• Unsourced quotations displaying zero industry knowledge, frustratingly veiling from whom the idiocy emanated from.

• The coup de grace, however, stands alone:

• Without comment or highlight Madison Mills exposed that a single customer contributed a 7th of Anthropic’s ARR due to a fat-fingered contract, which the customer paid, implying they absorbed the shock. Experience can be an expensive education.

I earnestly hope somebody with a breadth of reach, and heft of legitimacy, takes up this mantel.

A sword of truth needs to hack at these destructive and deceptive piles of slop.

Yesterday SpaceX’s S-1 filing came out. The secondary markets have been trading it at $2T. The bankers are mooting a similar number.

I added up the parts from the filing, and have come to a very different view.

Do not take me for a doom monger by default. I put Anthropic at $4T the other day.

But doom is the only conclusion for SpaceX.

Subscribe now

The Case in Five Lines

• The rockets have won a $3B market. There is no second act.

• Starlink’s growth is holding on by eviscerating ARPU - no good will come of that.

• Starlink’s business only works by being subsidised by the rockets business.

• The AI division is a shrinking Twitter wearing a GPU costume.

• Combined, the whole thing burns cash to stand still.

A confession before we start. I am going to take the first quarter of 2026, times by 4, note the growth rate compared to 2025, then use that growth rate for the next 3Qs. It’s clunky, I show below it doesn’t work when lumpy. I also use the Q1 profit margin for the full year. It may be unfair to a company that builds rockets which land themselves. It is also the freshest data we have. Watch what it does to the story.

There it is. A business doing $19B of revenue, growing 2%. Extrapolating a $4.3B loss to the full year with the same 91% negative margin seems harsh. When you see Q1 also had $10B(!) of Capex, maybe it is kind. You can quarrel with my hammer. You cannot quarrel with the direction. And the headline flatters it, because by segment it gets worse.

To be worth $2T you have to resemble the club that earns it. Nvidia is a $5T company growing 60% and printing money. The rest of the trillion-dollar set throws off oceans of profit. YTD Anthropic is sitting at $45B ARR at 12,400% YTD growth annualised. That will taper, but reportedly they are making profit to go with it.

SpaceX grows 2% and sets fire to billions. So the whole bull case has to rest on the future, not the present. Fair enough. Let us audit the future, one segment at a time.

The Rockets are Glamorous and Going Nowhere

Start with the bit everyone fell in love with. The rockets.

Falcon and Starship are the most extraordinary machines, yet as a business line they are a rounding error sliding backwards. Q1 is 30% down on Q1 in 2025. Perhaps a blip, but growth has stalled for some time, perhaps because there is nowhere left to sell.

The entire global market for putting other people’s things into orbit is around $3.1B. SpaceX already owns roughly 80% of the commercial slice and effectively all of the government slice. They have not under-penetrated a vast opportunity. They have won a tiny one. The other 86% of the tonnage they fly is their own satellites, billed to themselves at a price of zero. You cannot grow into a market you have already eaten.

And Starship does not fix this. Build a cheaper, bigger rocket and you do not conjure new payloads out of the sky; you simply lower the price of a market you already control. Cheaper launch is wonderful for humanity. It is terrible for the launch line on a $2T income statement.

Starlink is the Cash Cow. Or is it?

So the value must sit in Starlink. This is where the believers point, and fair enough, it is the only line growing.

$19.5B annualised, up 71%, a 36% operating margin. Lovely.

But the growth is not what it looks like.

Subscribers rose from 8.9M to 10.3M. Good. But average revenue per user fell from $81 to $66. Solve for the new cohort and they are arriving at minus $29 a month. SpaceX is not selling more dishes at the old price. It is buying subscribers with discounts to keep the top line moving. That is not a cash cow. That is a Groupon.

It is also worth mentioning, Starlink is not a cash volcano as a standalone enterprise, because Starlink does not pay for its own rockets.

Every Starlink satellite rides to orbit with no revenue recorded to the Launch business. It is put into capex depreciation. Charge those launches at the arms-length rate SpaceX charges its real customers and the bill comes to roughly $25B, dwarfing the current $11B for the business unit. The cash cow is grazing on free grass the rest of the company is quietly paying for. They are not two segments. Let us consider them as one.

Together, Old SpaceX is an Engine in Reverse

So let us stop pretending the two are separate and combine them.

$16B of revenue. No growth. A respectable EBITDA line, until you remember this is the most capex intensive you could think of. Subtract the capital expenditure and the number that actually matters, EBITDA minus capex, is negative every single year, and getting worse, on track for minus $3.7B. This is the core of SpaceX. It consumes cash to stand still.

The bulls will tell you the capex is the investment that becomes the moat, that one day the building stops and the cash gushes out. Perhaps. But 24 years in, the line that ought to be bending towards daylight is bending the other way. At some point an investment that never turns is just a cost.

The $1.25T Merger

In February of this year, the business above was merged with another Musk vehicle, xAI, to form a lip-licking AI division alongside it. The terms of the merger, naturally at an arm’s length valuation to prevent any suggestions of impropriety, put the previous business at $1 trillion and the xAI business at $250 billion.

Before we dive into the latter amount, let us just quickly recall that, for context, Toyota is also valued at $250 billion, with revenue of $340 billion and earnings of $34 billion.

The Dregs Valued Like a Religion

Let us open the books on the segment in the white-hot AI sector.

The AI segment annualises to $3.5B of revenue against a $10.5B operating loss. A negative 302% margin. For every dollar it earns, it spends four. And the revenue is the kindest thing about it, because of where it comes from.

Strip it down and the “AI” business is actually a crumbling Twitter. A platform that was doing $5.1B on 37% annual growth when Musk first got involved. Now it is doing $2.7B and shrinking. Grok subscriptions add $250M. Data licensing another $250M. The future, we are told, is Colossus, a wall of GPUs. Except Grok has not won at the frontier, so the compute is being let out to the companies that did. The marquee tenant is Anthropic, who have agreed to pay $1.25B a month from July 2026. However, more than $20B of capex over the last five quarters, on top of the losses, shows this is not a high-margin endeavour. The AI champion’s only AI idea left is to be a landlord to its betters.

What Is Left?

So what justifies the rest of the $2T?

The S-1 points you to data centres in space, cities on Mars, and chips that do not exist yet. On the other side of the ledger, the same filing notes SpaceX spent $820M with Tesla. $130M was on Cybertrucks. That equates to roughly 2,000 Cybertrucks at sticker price. No bulk discount. Good deal for Tesla. Inexplicable for SpaceX shareholders.

Let’s put it together:

• Launch (rockets) have won a $3B market.

• Connectivity (Starlink) grows by discounting and flies on launches it does not account for.

• Combined, the hardware burns cash to stand still.

• The AI arm loses three dollars for every one it earns and is mostly a shrinking social network and an expensive capitulation in the frontier LLM war.

• The rest is slideware.

The Case for Using Adjusted EBITDA

The S-1 lays out a table for Adjusted EBITDA that investors may find instructive:

Allow me to adjust the adjustments as I see fit.

• Depreciation is a non-cash expense. That can stand.

• Share-based compensation cannot. That is wages. An item I expect will continue.

• Restructuring and impairment charges are what I would consider the cost of running a business that changes its mind. I shall not accept them. ‘Other’ is not a good enough reason for me either.

• Removing interest expenses and costs will get us to the underlying profitability of the business. Let’s have them stand.

• Provisions for taxes I shall playfully ignore. I do not think this business is likely to be making money anytime soon.

• On the other side, whilst depreciation is a non-cash expense, if you add that back, you must take off capex. So I have.

Here lies the underlying profitability of SpaceX:

I do not know what makes a rocket go up and land itself. Impressive engineering apparently. But that is not a valuation method. Strip the romance and the related-party traffic out of the S-1 and you are left with a no-growth, cash-negative collection of segments.

Markets reward a story right up until the S-1 lands and replaces it with a balance sheet. The S-1 has landed.

This is not a $2T business. This is not even a $100B business, unless the forecasts and roadshow pitch, when they come, say otherwise.

Not financial advice. I could not tell you what a semiconductor does, and I certainly cannot fly a rocket. DYOR.

Subscribe now

UPDATE 1st June:

I finessed the methodology (totally left out HoldCo discount for investments...).

• $SKM price down as of 29 May close (before today’s 10% upwards riot).

• Listed investments (PENG and IONQ especially) went up.

• $65B funding ($50B new) at $965B post-money. Dilution of $SKM stake duly plugged in.

• 25% HoldCo discount added to all $SKM investments.

• The world isn’t ready for Anthropic at $4T. I’ve put $2T in the SOTP this time. Because who are you kidding, this is the reason to buy the stock.

Model here.

Also, OpenRouter data has Anthropic dominating even more.

New SOTP

TLDR

• I mistook Claude for being French for quite some time.

• Anthropic is vastly under-valued, mainly because bigger numbers are intimidating.

• Real time alternative data indicates the market may be under-estimating Anthropic’s dominance.

• Using that data, market commentary and comps, I argue Anthropic is worth $4 trillion today.

• A listed early investor in Anthropic, has all kinds of other jewels in its portfolio buried deep in the Korean regulatory disclosures.

• The riddle of their ownership stake in Anthropic is clarified.

• With a little hyperbole, I reveal this amounts to a back door to investing in Anthropic, in the public markets, for free.

• The Anthropic proxy has 150% upside with a SOTP valuation.

• I am not a qualified financial analyst, though know a thing or two. Not Financial Advice.

• I could not really explain what a semiconductor is. DYOR.

You can see the more detailed and less flippant model that underpins this analysis here.

Subscribe now

Part 1: The $4 trillion Anthropic

No business ever has, or likely ever will, be like Anthropic. I am going to explain why the market is colossally underpricing them at a mere trillion.

I had been using Claude alongside the other big dogs for a while, and of course it was nice to see a European company up there, even if it looked a little off the pace next to Googs and OpenAI. However it always wrote more fluently. I put it down to the usually insufferable Gallic habit of being extremely well read.

I digress. Let us get into some technical analysis of how Claude managed to sneak up from behind (classic French move ofc).

Well Claude just went ballistic.

Tech analysis over.

They started shipping updates at a speed that seemed impossible.

Actually turns out the French are cheating again. The devils are using their AI to build new AI! That’s not cricket if you ask me.

Yet his tools were astonishing. There is nothing like a Frenchman in his pomp. The stench of his monthly bathing schedule mixed with the aroma of fetid garlic was almost forgotten. He would build actual computer-y things (turns out a computer does more than internet-ing). Claude would smash out bangers over and over, and he would tut if I tried to press anything and interfere.

All those permissions definitely can have teething issues if you granted them too freely. Chum of mine got a bit trigger happy granting Claude carte blanche. The slimy frog stole his wife!

But now I barely notice he is foppishly wearing a scarf in the middle of summer, or smoking a Gauloise, as he churns out 50 hours of SWE time in 10 minutes. I have been Wispr-ing my prompts in a French accent to make his life easier.

That is the great problem we English suffer with having the French as our historical nemesis. Secretly, you can’t help but admire and envy them.

Well annoyingly Claude tricked me and turned out to be American also, but I still prompt in French regardless.

Let us get into it.

Revenue Explosion

Anthropic’s reported ARR by month:

YTD growth rate is 12,400% annualised. Holy smokes. Not even slowing down last month.

Last week Dario admitted Anthropic had “planned for 10x and saw 80x” growth in Q1. They have done incredibly well to hang on to their hats.

What The Growth Rate Implies For Year-End ARR

From the $45B April base:

Comparisons

The only company at this scale and growth rate to compare is NVIDIA, which peaked at 206% YoY in late 2023 at a $73B annualised quarterly run rate ($18B for the quarter). It became the world’s most valuable company a few months later. Today it sits near $5T on $200B revenue at 60% growth. EV / Revenue 24x.

Now the Newtonians amongst you will be jabbing their fingers about gravity. Gravity is real. Every company that flies out of the blocks spends the rest of its corporate life trying to arrest the declining rate of growth. Apparently it is a lot harder to add $10B of growth in a quarter than $10M.

The TAM Question

Gravity relates to TAM and capacity at the firm. Global enterprise IT spend, per finger-in-the-air merchants Gartner, is $1.6T. Capturing 20% market share by year end is impossible.

Lucky that is not the TAM. Knowledge work. Drug development. Medical devices. Gas exploration. Supply chains. Lawyers. Perfecting the baguettes of Paris (ofc not, that is the singularity definition).

Here is a sample of companies that have attributed firing 10% of their workforce to AI lately:

• Meta

• Dow Chemicals

• Citigroup

• Nestle

Now if you were a CEO and had over-hired, rather tempting to say you had made AI efficiencies (Nestle stock went up 9.5% upon announcement) rather than bluntly say “I am a moron” and get fired.

But the bloodletting is real and from the announcements, it is in every business.

I think TAM is titanic once you reframe your perspective:

• How important is it to implement fast everywhere in your org?

• Would you economise on the model if you thought your competitor was only using the best?

• Would you be yelling at the workers to spend more on AI to implement faster, or less and slower?

• Would you see this initiative as a project and ignore the rapid model advancements in subsequent months? Or would this implementation start fresh with every major update?

• Would spending 1% of your revenue to make seismic gains as the models accelerated seem worth paying for?

If I led you down the path just now, you can see how Claude could be trousering quite a few francs in the coming months and years.

The Competitive Moat

Now this thesis has rather presented Claude as a monopoly, which it is not, and that is a key hurdle to a higher valuation.

OpenAI’s new drop is supposedly just as good or better. Google are no doubt up to something too. Then of course, what about all the other ones. Will buyers decide almost as good is good enough?

In FT-style prose, I have spoken with five people familiar with the matter. One of them actually knows what they are talking about, and they say “Claude first, the rest nowhere.”

This powerful market research is likely enough for most readers, but I have gone the extra mile.

OpenRouter: A Rubbernecker’s Dream

OpenRouter is a website where you can register and switch between hundreds of models willy nilly. It is for the connoisseurs and the tinkerers. Little of that $45B is flowing through here, but it is a treasure trove just the same.

The data they share is up to the minute. You can see how all the models performed each day. The timeliness is glorious not only as a proxy for MoM growth. Claude spend grew on the platform by 50% last month. Same as the actual revenue.

Its potency is fantastic for seeing the enthusiasm and uptake of new iterations from all the players. Let’s see if 5.5 swept the floor in the end? Or are the almost-free options too hard to resist. Below see week ending Fri 8 May.

Good God. Anthropic taking 64% of the whole market. Charging double OpenAI and 8x Google. Moonshot can take a bow. Everyone else is nowhere. No wonder Musk was renting his Colossus out to Anthropic. 0.5% market share is a failed model if these are representative.

Note $33M for Anthro = $1.7B ARR. About 4% of the $45B. Not insignificant, but not definitive.

Like China in the Ping Pong at the Olympics. Gold, Silver, Bronze, the rest nowhere.

Things can change of course. But OpenAI has some demons within. Only two of the founding 11 members are still at the company. Three of the execs seemingly got ejected a couple of weeks ago. There is a vicious court case at the moment between Musk and Altman. There are demons in this company.

Anthropic, by comparison, have taken their ethical responsibility much more seriously. Indeed, the Anthropic founders came from OpenAI for this very reason. The speed of output and production on Anthropic seems like a hard gap for OpenAI to close. Google, of course, are a perennial competitor to take Anthropic’s crown, but boy, are they a long way away at the moment, as per that data.

Compute And The Value Chain

What about running out of compute? When there is a shortage of oil, how do the oil companies fare? Not a material threat.

What about users just being able to switch model at the drop of a hat, forcing prices into competition? That is very unlikely the way enterprise software is going to work. One would imagine that already multi-year contracts are being signed by a freshly minted enterprise sales team. God, they must be making some money.

The one obstacle to the bull case I’m presenting that I cannot comment on with any confidence is who is going to take all the money in this distribution chain. This industry is astonishing. Names are falling out of the sky that are cramming the top valuations in the world, and astonishingly, for very good reason. ASML sits at the top. They make the machines that make the machines. I don’t actually know what that means. But everyone seems to agree nobody else can. Apparently, you need 40 years of accumulated knowledge to get up to where they are, and presumably over those 40 years ASML will make some advances themselves.

Here are some words:

• Nano metres

• Width of a hydrogen atom

• Mirror that, if was the size of Germany, it would not deviate a millimetre.

• 100,000 independent widgets in just one machine

Like me, you don’t need to know what they mean. None of them relate to my three preferred reference points for size: packet of cigs, a football pitch, or the size of Wales. But they explain why ASML has zero competition. Nvidia and TSMC are not far away from their monopolistic position. The reason they have such strength can be summed up in the following sentence:

Everything in AI is really fiddly.

The other mesmerising valuations for Broadcom, SK Hynix, Intel, Samsung, Micron, and others all relate to the paucity of competitors.

There is a question about where all the profits will fall in that value chain. Compared to ASML, NVIDIA and TSMC, who face almost no credible competition for what they do, Anthropic sits in the most contested seat. OpenAI, Google and the long tail of open-source contenders are in the same arena. The OpenRouter data above tells you that Claude is winning on dollar share today, not that competition has gone away.

I can take faith in the dynamics of a natural shift towards customers demanding the best provider, and the users of that provider, like me, don’t even know why a mirror has to be the size of Germany (jk). They know they just need to mainline Claude. Thus Anthropic will maintain significant pricing power in the AI value chain.

DYOR.

Mythos

Claude has written a model, Mythos, that is too dangerous to release. Mozilla Firefox had it give their code the once-over. 271 vulnerabilities it found. Yikes. So the tech stacks of the world, and Mythos, need some polish before it can be released. However, it is in the hands of about 50 companies. JPM, Goldman and Morgan Stanley have it. Looks like many of their rivals don’t yet.

If I was Jamie Dimon, I would be passive-aggressively tapping my watch to ensure the workers got a wriggle on with this superpower. Not a time for fiscal restraint. Borrow some money. Fire some chumps. But get ahead.

Defending $4 Trillion Today

I go into the comps in the model, but the real comp for $45B annualised at this scale is NVIDIA a couple of years ago. They peaked at 206% YoY growth in Q3 calendar 2023 at $18B quarterly ($73B annualised run rate). Six months later, they knocked Microsoft and Apple off the perch and became the world’s most valuable company. Today, they are growing at 60% on $200B of revenue, 24x EV/Revenue, $5T enterprise value. Another reference point is Snowflake’s IPO, where they were growing at 121% and got 132x revenue. But that was at a paltry $500M of revenue. Palantir today on $7.7B of revenue, 85% growth, gets 42x EV/Revenue. For context the other way: Tesla today is at 12x revenue; revenue is shrinking 5% and they are worth around a trillion on $95B. Multiple is around 11x.

The comps are useless, but it has got to be higher, surely, because 12,400% is higher than 200%. Indeed, if they do not grow a single dollar in ARR for the rest of the year, they will still have grown 400% YoY. I am going to say 89x on $45B. I justify that a little more in the spreadsheet, but there is not a lot else to look at.

Multiples of revenue. Of course, acknowledging that some of these other companies were profitable by then, but profitability is almost irrelevant when you are going that fast. Gross margin is reportedly at 40% so the roadmap to profits is certainly there. They will never likely get to SaaS multiples, but from our comp set, none of them could ever dream of growth rates this fast at this scale.

The model walks through five independent methods.

* Forward Dec 2026 EV is discounted back to today by 1.12^(8/12) for the eight months between the May 2026 ADR price and the Dec 2026 forward ARR base. 12% is the assumed cost of equity. Per the model, Anth_Valuation tab.

I tried weighting different outcomes, which miraculously also got to 4 trillion. An unerring coincidence.

The model’s probability-weighted central:

$4T is the central, not the bull. For today.

The Bridge To Korea

However, it doesn’t matter a jot. Anthropic is a private company. I don’t suppose Claude will be rattling his tin too broadly if and when they raise again. $10B minimum cheque size might be on the low end.

Yet none of that gets in the way, because I am going to tell you how you can invest in Monsieur Claude. Minimum ticket size $1. No max. The $10B+ investors are going in at $1T minimum valuation.

What Anthropic’s valuation actually is matters less than you think, because I am going to show you how to acquire a stake in Anthropic for free.

The most intelligent of you will instantly see this is the opportunity of a lifetime, take my word for it, and want directions to the cash volcano. The simpletons alas will have their customary scepticism that I will be forced to address.

Every word above is based upon the truth, but I must admit I have used words that may give the wrong impression.

For now I must say au revoir to Monsieur Claude. The absolute frontier of human development will take an unlikely path to a chaebol in Korea. I worked as a salaryman for their more illustrious rival in Gangnam for a year or two. What chance that it will help me be your jungle guide 20 years on.

Part 2: The Schleswig-Holstein question

“Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business. The Prince Consort, who is dead. A German professor, who has gone mad. And I, who have forgotten all about it.”

The ownership structure of Samsung is almost the same. Nobody was ever able to explain how it all worked. Just one thing was known with certainty, and that was all the actual power of the conglomerate was in Samsung Everland. An owner of a theme park that proudly boasts as their tagline on their site: “the drier park ... of two famed parks.”

I’ve never looked this up since because if I look it up, it might then know it is not true. I prefer believing what I was told.

I only say this so you now understand I do have some experience of Korean chaebol. But only a little.

I am taking you to the SK Group, who were rather the dullards compared to LG and Hyundai when I was there, but now they managed to make one of the fiddly bits in the AI production chain (SK Hynix jumped from $100B to $1T in the last year). Not to that subsidiary. To a much more unlikely place than you could imagine: SK Telecom, the Korean version of Verizon.

SK Telecom is a mature mobile operator and broadband provider serving South Korea. Revenue roughly $12.5B. Not glamorous.

The Headline Numbers

Telco businesses are really boring, normally. Hard to grow when:

• Wi-Fi and 5G are fast enough.

• Nobody wants a landline.

• Cable TV’s in decline.

You can only really make more money by:

• Duping your punters into an upsell they don’t really want

• Squeezing 50 basis points on cost

Capex is largely done, so good cash flows but not going anywhere. A quasi-utility.

SKM even bungled that. They had a data leak, and it was quite bad. Quite a few customers left, and they were pretty annoyed. There’s a hangover from that, not in terms of financial fines but a poor reputation. It seems to have turned the corner, and subscribers are growing again. This is reflected in the revenue and profit. If you look at the consolidated financial statements, they are not great. The data leak cost a bunch of money to remediate.

SK Telecom’s AI Pivot

In 2022 SKT made a song and dance about becoming an AI company. This was, at the time, somewhat laughable. Hard to think of a claim to being a tech company that is more tenuous than “we do broadband.” They pressed on anyway and made a series of investments. From the cash flows of the core business, they started spending money like sailors in port on all kinds of crackpot investments. If it had AI in it, they invested. This was to the discredit of management in the markets until recently. The CEO behind this was subsequently fired.

There has been almost no coverage that I’ve found of this investment portfolio. That makes sense. The only place I found it disclosed was in the business report, which is a separate document in Korean, not in the English version (16 pages) but in the Korean-language version (nearly 500 pages).

Those who may read this and knew me in Korea will probably know only one thing about me: I was the most gifted Korean language student they had ever seen for dense business and technical terms. It was my passion, my reason to exist. They laughed. What a waste of time it was. They don’t laugh today.

Actually, I never learned a word of Korean, and my good man Claude found what I was looking for in about four seconds on pages 441 and 442. Turns out investing in AI in 2022 had some merit.

The Investments That Matter

You can see the line-by-line in the spreadsheet, but it turns out this artificial intelligence was not a flash in the pan. Let me run you through the highlights.

Minority investment accounting was never my sweet spot, and it’s quite dense. Just ‘trust me bro’, and don’t actually take my readings as gospel, but they should be good.

In this list there are different types:

• Mark-to-market, where the entity is listed, so you can update that number in a moment

• Equity accounting, which is notoriously unrepresentative of value

• Fair value accounting, which is a bit of a mess, but should be the auditor’s agreed assessment of the correct value at year end. This invariably applies a DLOM of 25%.

I updated the mark-to-market valuations in the list, and some have shown extraordinary equity growth. For others, I reviewed the AI holdings that, based on public information, may warrant a revaluation.

Here are the six positions worth a line each. Anthropic excluded; that is the next section.

Details of the other smaller investments and their uplift are in the model. Listed investments have been updated with the current share price. Here are a few details on the non-listed investments:

Rebellions. Korean AI silicon designer. Pre-IPO priced round in March 2026 had it at $2.3B.

Persona Identities. SKM holds 3.9%. Last priced round was $2B in April 2025. I have marked Persona at $3.5B, a value judgement based on commercial performance and secular trends since the last funding round over a year ago. The fuller justification (Anthropic vendor selection, LinkedIn and Reddit logos, headcount doubling, regulatory tailwinds, comparable transactions) is set out in the model.

Perplexity AI. AI search. SKM put $10M in during June 2024. Implied $25B secondary. 0.33% stake. Marked at $62M after 25% DLOM. 6.2x money in less than two years. The market value depends on whether Perplexity actually has a defensible business or whether it ends up as a feature on someone else’s chatbot. But the priced rounds keep printing higher.

All together, the revaluation gives the investment portfolio a mark of $3.9B against a book of $2.1B, an uplift of $1.8B over what the accounts alone would have you believe.

The Core Business

A mature Korean telco at 81% 5G handset penetration deserves a pedestrian multiple. Wireless capex fell 42% in FY2025. The 5G build is done. D&A continues to charge the income statement above maintenance capex, which means the cash generation is understated. AI Data Centre revenue in Q1 2026 was $89M quarterly, up 28.8% YoY but down 17.6% QoQ from the Q4 2025 Pangyo step-up. Annualised that is $356M of run rate on the operational footprint of Gasan and Pangyo, which now sits at its capacity ceiling. KEPCO power-connection lead times of 12+ months and MOTIE’s metro-build restrictions mean SKM’s existing operational MW are scarce assets in the highest-demand AI training market in Asia. The capacity-bound dynamic supports the $2.3B SOTP mark; new capacity from the announced FY26 Seoul-metro build will not contribute revenue until 2028.

I value the core at 4.5x Korean peer median EV/EBITDA, which gives $16.2B. The DCF on the same business gives c. $20B; I use it as a sense-check rather than the central, because for a mature Korean telco the comp set has more gravity than a single-firm five-year DCF.

Sum Of The Parts

SKM appears to be trading at a 15% discount to a defensible sum-of-the-parts. A Korean telco with a nice AI portfolio at a discount.

Korean Sell-Side Coverage

Korean sell-side coverage is split. Spot ADR is $39.08 for reference.

Telco equity analysts do not think in revenue multiples. They think in cash flow forecasts and have not looked at SKM in the right manner. No better example is Goldman Sachs, who in their Q1 2026 report reiterating their sell opinion and do not once mention any of the investments made and give no attribution to them in their model.

Worth noting that the historical Korean discount on holding-company structures has been narrowing materially. The Commercial Code Amendment that came into force on 22 July 2025 extended directors’ fiduciary duty explicitly to shareholders, not just the company. President Lee Jae Myung’s Value-Up programme is the first serious legislative attack on the chaebol governance regime that produced the discount. The KOSPI is up roughly 80% year-to-date 2026. The “30-50% NASPERS-style discount” base case assumed in older SOTP work on Korean holdcos is anchored to a regime that is being actively dismantled. SKM benefits structurally regardless of the Anthropic outcome.

That is the SK Telecom story. A telecom company, a set of investments worth meaningfully more than their book values, and a 15% discount to intrinsic value.

Part 3: About that other investment

Oh. One more thing.

The sum-of-the-parts valuation of SK Telecom more than justifies its current valuation. However, I left one of their investments aside.

In August 2023, SK Telecom invested $100M in Anthropic and acquired (their language at the time) a “2%” stake. Anthropic was being priced at around $5B at the time.

This is what you get for free on top, if you buy shares in SK Telecom.

Since the investment, Anthropic has raised quite a lot of capital.

The ownership question is where this gets interesting, and where almost every analyst who has touched it has gone wrong.

The market consensus puts SKM’s Anthropic stake at approximately 0.30% on a fully diluted basis. This figure is cited in English-language press, picked up from a loosely worded SKM disclosure, and propagated without verification.

It is wrong, and the error is in the denominator.

The Correct Chain

Page 441 to 442 of the 2025 Business Report (Korean edition, 442 pages, not the 16-page English summary) discloses 3,703,141 shares at a 0.7% stake as of year-end 2024 (opening balance for FY25), with a carrying value of $132M at the disclosure FX rate.

Korea Investment & Securities analyst Kim Jung-chan stated in January 2026 that SKM held 0.7% of Anthropic per the H1 2025 semi-annual DART filing. He is a covered analyst at a tier-one Korean broker quoting a primary regulatory filing.

PitchBook reports 1.47B fully diluted Anthropic shares. That figure includes authorised-but-unissued option pools that have never been granted. Those do not dilute SKM economically.

The treasury stock method, mandatory for public-company diluted EPS, only counts options to the extent they are in the money and net of strike. Reserved-but-ungranted pools are excluded.

Anthropic’s auditor Samil PwC switched from basic to fully-diluted presentation between the H1 and FY 2025 disclosures. The economic reality, the share count, did not change. The disclosure convention did.

Working Forward To Today

Starting from 0.7% basic at H1 2025, threading through:

• Series F (September 2025), $13B raised at $183B post-money, approximately 7% dilution

• Series G (February 2026), $30B raised at $380B post-money, approximately 8% dilution

• Employee tender offer (February 2026), conversion of vested options

• Amazon $5B at $350B pre-money (20 April 2026), approximately 1.4% dilution

• Google $10B at $350B pre-money (24 April 2026), approximately 2.8% dilution

SKM’s basic ownership at 13 May 2026 is 0.54%.

Korean sell-side at Meritz Securities and Korea Investment & Securities both cite approximately 0.58% post-Series-G (pre April 2026 strategic equity). That corroborates the calculation within rounding. Any reader can trace this themselves in the filings. The 0.30% figure being used by the market is the wrong denominator on the wrong share count.

Google is contractually capped at 15% of Anthropic, with no voting rights and no board seat. So further dilution from this counterparty is structurally limited.

What 0.54% Of Anthropic Is Worth

Applying a 5% illiquidity discount (compressed from the standard 25% K-IFRS Level 3 given IPO expected within 6 to 9 months):

Carrying value on the SKM balance sheet today is $962M (auditor-declared, no methodology disclosed). Cost was $100M. Already 9.6x on book without any forward mark.

The Implied Anthropic Valuation At The Current SKM Price

At central marks for every other asset, SKM’s ex Anthropic equity comes to $17.7B against a current market capitalisation of $15.0B. The premium of ex Anthropic equity over market cap is $2.7B, or 18%.

At the current price, the market is giving you the Anthropic stake for free. Or better than free.

Only at core EV/EBITDA multiples below the Korean peer median does the market start to credit any Anthropic value at all. At the actual Korean peer median multiple of 4.5x, the market prices Anthropic at less than zero. The deal-of-the-century framing is not hyperbole. It is arithmetic.

The Full Picture

Total SKM equity at various Anthropic outcomes, with the implied ADR price at each:

At every Anthropic valuation at or above the priced Series G, SKM is cheap. The only scenario in which it is not cheap is one in which Anthropic is overvalued at $380B. You are welcome to take that view. It requires believing that a company doing $45B ARR, growing 5x YTD, with Jamie Dimon on stage, ten gigawatts of committed compute, and a cybersecurity model the White House has cleared for federal use, is worth less than $380B. Good luck.

Claude is still wearing that foppish scarf and it is mid-May on the Mediterranean. I forgive him.

You can see the more detailed and less flippant model that underpins this analysis here.

Subscribe now

Risks

The SK Telecom business risks are largely irrelevant given the entire upside thesis sits on Anthropic. The risks to my $4 trillion Anthropic valuation are laid out previously.

It is worth noting the additional risks of the proxy in between, the Korean holding company. Such structures have historically traded at a discount due to the opaque governance often involved, where the interests of the owners are not always aligned with the interests of the shareholders. Though this is not exclusive to Korea, investors in NASPERS and their titanic success in investing in Tencent have pulled their hair out, as much of the proceeds remain within NASPERS, which has continued to incinerate shareholder value in other investments rather than return the money. That risk is real. Yet the NASPERS comparison is perhaps unfair, as firstly, SKM is not run by a lunatic, and secondly the other investments shown by SK Telecom have also performed extremely well; but the transmission of the proceeds of an Anthropic IPO to shareholders should not be ignored.

The other main risk is the opacity of the ownership stake in Anthropic. It is far from clear through the company’s own communications, and the most compelling evidence is buried deep within Korean-language reports. The value ascribed in this analysis could be off by 20%, and shareholders are unlikely to receive much clarity going forward. Not only through cautious disclosures from SK Telecom but also Anthropic’s insistence that shareholders do not share proprietary data.

Catalysts

Four catalysts for price discovery over the next 6 to 9 months. The first three are information events that should help clarify the thesis. Only the fourth, the IPO, provides full mark-to-market resolution.

1. May ARR print (expected mid-June). $50 to 60B confirms trajectory. $65B+ validates the central case as conservative. Anything below $50B requires reweighting the probability distribution and compressing the central from $4T to $1.5 to 2T.

2. Mythos broader release. Currently restricted to JPM, Goldman, and a small set of partners. Treasury and Fed engagement is active. A broader rollout, with announced enterprise contracts at scale, repositions Anthropic from frontier AI lab to systemically important infrastructure. The Mozilla disclosure (271 vulnerabilities surfaced in Firefox in a single day) is the technical proof-point already in the public domain.

3. Series H pricing. Bloomberg and TechCrunch have the active round in the $850 to 900B range and imminent. The pricing sets the floor for IPO discussion. A close above $900B collapses any remaining argument that Anthropic at trillion-plus is speculative.

4. IPO. Goldman, JPM and Morgan Stanley are named as underwriters. Wilson Sonsini S-1 filing rumoured Q3. Target window Q4 2026 with October the earliest. On IPO the K-IFRS Level 3 illiquidity discount collapses to zero and the SKM stake becomes a mark-to-market liquid public security overnight. That is the one event that resolves the thesis.

This document is an independent investment analysis prepared for personal use. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. The author is not a registered investment advisor. All sources are publicly available. Conduct your own research.

SEE THE MAIN REPORT HERE

Subscribe now

20 March 2026 | noseyparker.org

DISCLAIMER: The author holds a short position in Alaska Air Group (ALK) and stands to profit from a decline in the share price. This document should be read in conjunction with the main report dated 18 March 2026. It represents analysis of publicly available information and constitutes opinion, not investment advice.

ALK has known since at least 2022 that its loyalty platform has a critical cyber vulnerability.

Thousands of its most loyal and lucrative customers have had their accounts drained by hackers. Alaska’s consistent response is to blame the victim’s password hygiene, restore the stolen points as a “one time courtesy,” and permanently restrict the victim’s account.

Today the exact unremediated vulnerability is unveiled, along with the organised crime money trail that surrounds it.

For investors, the loyalty programme -- valued by management in December 2024 at $12 billion -- has lost its financial controls as a result of this flaw.

The main report released simultaneously today should be consulted for evidentiary precision and sourced evidence. What follows is a precis of that investigation.

I shall start with repeating the spark of this all.

Act 1: The LinkedIn Spark

In August 2025, the author saw a LinkedIn post about an Alaska Airlines member having his account drained of loyalty points and subsequently replenished. Others responded to report the same experience.

Three questions in this posting bothered the author:

1. Why can Alaska not block these clearly fraudulent bookings and stop the thefts?

2. What purpose could the mandatory telephone PIN booking system, forced upon the victim, serve?

3. Why would the fraudulent traveller take the staggering risk of passing through the most secure environments conceivable, under his real identity, for a few transient hours of comfort?

The questions were perplexing enough to launch an investigation.

Act 2: 425 Thefts Gathered

The investigation found 425 victims. Each sourced and archived.

The cases were found predominantly in niche special interest forums:

About 30% shared the quantum of their loss. The average was approximately 220,000 miles.

Act 3: Mode of Theft

The thefts almost universally displayed the same characteristics. The pattern has been consistent since 2022:

• Accounts were compromised to book flights within days of travel.

• Flights were on partner airlines.

• Members’ notification emails were suppressed.

• In 96% of cases, the victim discovered the theft by reviewing their own account, and then informed Alaska.

Act 4: Alaska’s Response Policy

Alaska’s responses were so consistent that they must be the product of a policy, also unchanged since 2022.

Alaska reimburses the stolen points as a “one time courtesy.” This language leaves the victim in no doubt who Alaska blames.

Victims are then barred from booking award travel online. They must telephone Alaska, verbally relay a PIN, which unlocks their account for online booking for one hour.

Act 5: The Industry Backdrop

A snapshot was taken with controlled search terms to confirm what a cursory internet search shows indisputably: Alaska is suffering from loyalty account theft at a rate unmatched by any peer airline.

`

Act 6: Tip of an Iceberg

The 425 victims are indisputably a fraction of the actual total. Few people post publicly about a largely remediated matter that carries some embarrassment.

The USCardForum.com statistics were striking. A Chinese-language forum with 12,000 weekly visitors, where fewer than 5% of posts relate to Alaska, produced 48 victims willing to come forward. Extrapolations are not definitive, but hacked accounts in 2025 are indisputably in the thousands.

Act 7: The Criminal Marketplace

The miles are sold for extraordinary prices on the black market.

To take an admittedly extreme example: a $35,000 family-of-four trip to Barcelona can be had for less than $200.

The main report offers a host of insights from six sellers identified during the investigation (though their integrity must be in question). All were found with a Google search that located them openly on Facebook.

Highlights:

• “Ernest” only sells accounts that have been dormant for more than three years.

• “Akis” has an inventory of 3,000 accounts ready to go.

• “Asad” says his six-man operation sells 50 to 60 Alaska accounts a week.

The revelation of their respective payment coordinates took the investigation upon a new path.

Act 8: The Money Trail

The various ETH and BTC wallets proffered for payment opened a new thread. Some went straight to exchanges. Others entered a river of apparent illicit capital. Two addresses connected with accounts through which over $759 million has flowed to KYC-regulated exchanges.

This entire network appears to be a flurry of subpoenas away from dismantlement. The lack of caution suggests the impunity under which these operators work.

Act 9: Law Enforcement

Instinctively, one would expect an airline beset by attacks of this nature to pour resources into facilitating arrests and publicise them widely as a deterrent. Victim accounts suggest the opposite.

The State of Alaska Attorney General recently challenged Alaska on its reticence to assist law enforcement. Generously, one could call it discretion.

[IMAGE PLACEHOLDER: AG letter excerpt]

Act 10: A Track Record of Discretion

The main report details half a dozen instances in Alaska’s filings where management reveals a notable predilection against disclosure. The subject of hacked member accounts has been met with the same silence.

There is no doubt management are aware of these thefts. The VP of Loyalty stated specifically that this had “visibility all the way up to our CEO.” The local press at Fox, Kiro7, and the Seattle Times have separately investigated this matter.

If it is implausible that management has no awareness of the thefts, it is equally implausible that they have no awareness of the PIN lock system that follows an account compromise. The encumbrance on their most loyal customers is such that the CEO must have asked questions, and the additional cost must have drawn the CFO’s attention.

Act 11: The Riddle of the PIN Lock

Yet there it remains. Why?

Consider the established customer service policy after a theft. Miles are restored as a “one time courtesy.” Those very words attribute fault to the victim. Customer service representatives comment upon the victim’s password hygiene when the loss is reported.

Yet the PIN lock is incongruent with a password defence. The compromised password has been changed by the victim upon discovery, so the password is no longer the issue.

Logic dictates that the vulnerability is not at the password.

Act 12: The Logical Breakdown

Through the “one time courtesy” refund, victims are led to believe their password was compromised and that they are at fault. Yet after discovery the password is changed. If the vulnerability were at the password, the PIN lock would be nonsensical: the fresh password would suffice.

The PIN lock exists because changing the password does not remove the attacker.

Act 13: The Proof at Your Desk

You can prove this yourself right now.

1. Log in to your Alaska account on two separate browsers.

2. Change the password on one browser.

3. Refresh the other.

You will still be logged in. Changing the password does not invalidate existing sessions. Anyone who holds a session cookie retains full access to the account regardless of how many password changes are made.

The session cookie does contain an expiry date. Unfortunately, that expiry is perpetually refreshed with each use, maintaining the session for as long as the attacker remains active.

If your account has been compromised and miles stolen, there is no point returning them. They will be stolen again, because the attacker’s access persists. There are two solutions: fix the system, or unplug the victim from it.

Alaska chose the latter. The fact that Alaska does not invalidate this token overwhelmingly suggests it cannot.

Act 14: Passwords Not Required

The most likely explanation is that the session token is stateless -- it is self-contained and not checked against a server-side session store. Without a revocation list (which Alaska does not appear to maintain), the server has no mechanism to invalidate it.

One could argue that the original sin remains: that the password was compromised and the victim is culpable. But that session cookie, the one that grants full account access, is readable by any script on the page.

The cookie is not marked HttpOnly. Nor does it carry other standard defences against exfiltration.

The HttpOnly flag has been a cornerstone of web security since 2008. Without it, every third-party script on the page can read the cookie’s contents, and most Chrome extensions have broad enough permissions to do the same. With that cookie, they have your account.

This investigation observed 14 outside companies with active cookies on Alaska’s authenticated pages. Those companies need not be malicious. If any one of them suffered a breach at any time, that breach could inject code to sweep up the session cookies of every Alaska member who logged in during the window of compromise.

It is not only these firms. Any attacker who can inject code into one of those 14 third parties, or into Alaska’s own site, gains the same access.

Even if a member’s password security is beyond reproach, the missing HttpOnly flag means most Chrome extensions with standard permissions can silently read the session cookie.

The full report contains further significant weaknesses in the architecture, but to bring it back to plain language: if anyone obtains this cookie, they gain a session with full account privileges. In testing, no secondary authentication was required to change email, phone number, or passport details. There appears to be no way to revoke their access. They follow your travels at every step.

Act 15: What Management Knows

It is inconceivable that management are unaware of this weakness after four years. For technical reasons described above, a compromised session cookie persists as long as the attacker keeps it alive. Hence the PIN lock: it is not a security measure for the customer but a containment measure for the vulnerability.

Instead of remediating the flaw, Alaska has blamed the customers, inconvenienced them, and sanctioned their accounts.

If management are genuinely unaware, they must provide a vigorous explanation as to how.

Act 16: The Bridge to Price

The main report identifies nine distinct factors detailing the impact upon the crown jewel of Alaska Air Group. Here it suffices to assert that these findings should have seismic implications for how consumers, partners, lenders, and investors value Atmos Rewards.

Act 17: The LinkedIn Mysteries Answered

The questions that drew the author into this investigation can now be answered with confidence.

Mystery 1: Why can Alaska not block these clearly fraudulent bookings and stop the thefts?

Because its systems cannot see them. The architecture that processes award redemptions has no fraud detection capability.

Mystery 2: What purpose could the mandatory telephone PIN booking forced upon the victim serve?

Compromised accounts remain compromised for as long as the attacker maintains an active session. Without the subterfuge of blaming the victim and forcing them into the telephone system, replenished accounts would be drained again immediately.

Mystery 3: Why would the fraudulent traveller take on such staggering risks?

Because flat-bed flights almost anywhere in the world are cheaper than a taxi to the airport. And law enforcement are, as a matter of policy, not informed of the thefts.

425 victims. An unknown multiple beyond.

A vulnerability unchanged for at least four years.

A front door that remains, today, wide open.

Subscribe now

The full evidentiary report is available at https://noseyparker.pages.dev/baked-alaska

I have discovered proof that Alaska Airlines are, as a matter of company policy, facilitating the entry of foreign nationals into the United States, on tickets procured at an industrial scale by organised crime, via thefts from US citizens.

I have been researching these thefts and their impact on investors in Alaska Airlines, but a by-product is my uncovering that Alaska Airlines is fully aware of foreign nationals entering the United States, not only after arrival, but while in transit.

The firm does not involve law enforcement as a matter of policy. Their motivation is uncertain, but likely a combination of the expenditure, and concealing the scale of the thefts.

An open letter at the end of last year from State of Alaska Attorney General chastising Alaska Airlines for impeding law enforcement on another matter drew my attention to it.

I uncovered 425 cases in 2025 alone, which is a clear indication of 1000s, or even 10,000s that lay unreported.

The victim’s report over and over that Alaska Airlines refuses to involve law enforcement or any other government agency upon discovery.

This policy alone serves to facilitate the ongoing thefts conducted by organised crime.

Worse, this policy, without doubt, allows foreign nationals to enter the United States, facilitated by the industrial thefts by organised crime from US citizens, to enter the United States.

The victim testimonies are unanimous in their reports. Alaska Airlines do not involve law enforcement.

“The CSR said that unfortunately she has to do this 3-5 times per day and if the flight has already flown then miles are gone. I asked if I should report to authorities and she told me not to even bother.“ (link) (archive)

“asked Alaska Air to have police meet the person at the airport but they wouldn’t.” (link) (archive)

“When I asked about what AK air was going to do to hold the person accountable I was told that they had canceled the flight and no further action would be taken.” (link) (archive)

None is clearer than the case study I outline below.

• How many crimes have Alaska Airlines facilitated?

• How many criminals have been allowed to enter the United States by this policy?

• How many are within the country right now?

• How many more are entering every day?

Subscribe now

CASE STUDY: THE HOUSTON INBOUND FLIGHT

Alaska Airlines Declines to Notify Authorities of Fraudulent Traveller

Case Summary

On 12 July 2025, an Alaska Airlines loyalty member discovered that their account had been compromised and their miles used to book a business class flight for an unknown individual travelling from Dubai to Houston via Qatar Airways. (link) (archive link)

The victim discovered the fraud while the fraudulent passenger was still in transit. The flight was not scheduled to land in Houston until after 4pm, providing several hours for Alaska Airlines to coordinate with CBP or other federal authorities.

The victim explicitly asked how to report the fraud and whether the person could be arrested upon arrival.

Alaska Airlines’ response: “There was nothing they could do.”

Key Facts

Date of Discovery: 12 July 2025

Route: Dubai to Houston via Doha (Qatar Airways)

Cabin: Business Class

Miles Stolen: 215,000

Fraudulent Passenger Name: Visible in booking records (see screenshots)

US Port of Entry: Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport

Notification Window: Multiple hours before scheduled 4pm landing

Law Enforcement Coordination: None (per victim account)

Screenshot 1: Victim’s Initial Report

The victim posted to the Facebook group “Award Travel by Roame” on 12 July 2025, showing the fraudulent booking details and asking how to report the fraud or have the person arrested.

Victim’s statement: “Someone hacked my Alaska mileage and currently enroute from Dubai to Houston via Qatar airways business class. How do I report this or even better get them arrested if possible. They’re not anticipated to land until after 4pm.”

Source: Facebook, Award Travel by Roame group. Archive: archive.ph/IVxmB

Screenshot 2: Customer Service Response and Booking Record

The victim’s update shows: Alaska Airlines customer service mentioning the compromise may be linked to a recent data transfer issue, suggesting awareness of a broader security problem;

Screenshot 3: Booking Record

The victim shares the name of the fraudulent traveller.

Screenshot 4: The Victim Shares Alaska Airlines Response

Exchange:

Tania McKeown: “Did they catch the person who did this?”

Adrian H. Liu: “nope. There was nothing they could do, unfortunately.”

Outcome: The fraudulent passenger entered the United States on a ticket procured through organised crime. No law enforcement coordination occurred despite hours of advance notice, a known US port of entry, and a named passenger.

What This Case Demonstrates

1. Alaska Airlines had advance notice of fraudulent international travel to the United States.

2. The victim explicitly requested law enforcement involvement.

3. Alaska possessed the fraudulent passenger’s name and booking details.

4. Multiple hours remained before the passenger would clear US Customs at Houston.

5. Alaska declined to coordinate with CBP or any law enforcement agency.

6. The customer service representative indicated awareness of a broader security issue affecting multiple accounts.

7. The fraudulent passenger entered the United States without interdiction.

Subscribe now