Pearson Airport bag tag switching lawsuits, Digi Mart USA News (Toronto, Canada): What happens when a simple trip turns into a nightmare? Part two of W5’s five-part investigation on CTVNews.ca follows travellers who say they went from passenger to prisoner, caught in a scheme that crossed borders and changed lives forever.
More than two dozen Canadians accused of international drug smuggling are now turning to a personal injury lawyer, claiming they were victims of a bag tag switching scheme. Some say the airlines offered them peanuts after they were detained abroad in nightmarish conditions.
W5 has identified more than two dozen cases of travellers being detained after their airline luggage tag was swapped from their bag and put onto another bag containing drugs, allegedly by corrupt workers at Pearson Airport. When the scheme goes as planned, an accomplice picks up the drug bag at the destination airport.
If the drugs are detected, the pickup is aborted, and the innocent passenger is left trying to explain why their luggage tag is on a bag of drugs.
Following W5’s initial investigation, more travellers have come forward, including Kristian Gjoni, a Toronto I.T. businessman facing up to 15 years in Albanian prison, and at least three Toronto women in their 60s or 70s.
Leila Drakes, who uses a wheelchair, said Barbados police spoke to her in 2024 about “a very large suitcase of cannabis” with her name on it. Grace Merano spent 24 hellish nights behind bars in the Philippines after being accused of importing 24 kilograms of methamphetamine.
Naomi, who requested anonymity, said she was detained at Narita Airport in Japan last year for allegedly smuggling 21 kilograms of meth. All three women flew out of Toronto Pearson International Airport.
A total of 11 people are now launching legal action to be compensated. Toronto lawyer Paul Miller, who has practiced personal injury law for 25 years, is representing them.
Miller told W5 he had never heard anything like the stories his clients told him. “This was shocking,” he said.
“This was right out of a James Bond type of movie.”
Being detained abroad is particularly traumatic, he noted. “That’s not your home country anymore.
Who’s there to help you? Who do you call?” he said.
Despite their ordeals, Miller said his clients were “basically told to go away” by the airlines.
Merano said her 24 nights in Filipino jail were spent sharing a three-by-five-metre space with three others. “You can see cockroaches crawling all over the place, big and small.
All I can do is just pray,” she said. Merano said Cathay Pacific Airways offered her about $22,000, roughly half of what she says the ordeal cost her in legal fees and upended travel plans.
Drakes, 77, said she got a call after joining her brother in Barbados that the drug squad was looking for her. Police came to her hotel, “very much to my embarrassment,” she wrote in a statement for police.
She was never charged with a crime. She said WestJet offered her a $300 flight credit.
Jan Baumann and Charlene Ranadheera, from Winnipeg, were detained on an Air Canada flight to Germany after their baggage tags were switched onto luggage containing 33 kilograms of marijuana. After being handcuffed and detained at Pearson for 12 hours, then released without charges, Ranadheera said the airline offered them about $2,000. “And we were like, ‘Haha, thank you, but no,'” she said.
Miller said his clients are seeking somewhere in the range of $100,000 to $1 million in each case.
Miller said most of his tag switching cases will involve suing several organizations, including the airline, Transport Canada and the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, which runs Pearson. Air Canada, Air Transat and WestJet said the airlines take security seriously but noted the many other organizations involved in the system.
Air Canada spokesperson Sean Davidson said luggage moves through “a complex network of infrastructure operated and overseen by various third parties.” Cathay Pacific did not comment by press time.
The Greater Toronto Airports Authority said it “does not direct or oversee baggage security,” and pointed to federal agencies and police. The Canada Border Services Agency said it is working with Transport Canada and the Greater Toronto Airports Authority to make airport security stronger.
Two-thirds of Canadians say they are concerned about tag switching, according to a Nanos Research poll done for W5 in September. Nearly half (45 per cent) of respondents say they have heard news coverage of tag switching in the past six months, and 44 per cent of those say they have changed their airport behaviours.
Almost half of those surveyed (48 per cent) said they were less confident in checked luggage systems than a year ago.
