They could easily verify him. He "accrued nearly 950,000 lifetime flight miles with United" and had been upgraded to business class. You normally don't kick customers out because they take pictures of the seats, this is BS, staff could invent lots of ways to ease this situation if they wanted to, but post 9/11 defacto standard for flight personnel is they can do this kind of silly things and get away with it in the name of security.