[rhino369]

>Donating a bag that your passenger has filed a claim for, and can tell you the location of, is a business decision.

It's not clear the airline could really determine which bag it was. I imagine these lost baggage centers have a very large amount of bags. Finding it is a needle in a hackstack problem under the likely assumption that the bag is lost because the airline paper tag was missing or unreadable.

There aren't enough facts to determine any active choice was made here. The airline should pay for the bag, but nothing seem malicious here.

[renewiltord]

You can use Find My to isolate the bag. It'll lead you to the general direction, you can pull the bag from the bunch based on a passenger description, and then you can just walk it away from the rest to see if it is correct.