An "airline captain with half a million points" is a most interesting discovery. This guy must love to fly and travel since the rates paid by airlines for crew rooms are not technically eligible for collecting HHonors points. He'd have to do an awful lot of personal travel to accumulate that number.

I would think the most likely way of having a duplicated PIN is by selecting your own combination of numbers. HHonors would originally generate their numbers randomly, so the likelihood of duplication would be more unlikely than several members having the same birth dates [common PIN], etc.

But as noted, you would have to mistype both the account and PIN to get into someone else's account, and that would be a most improbable coincidence, since both numbers would be random choices and not often likely to yield an active account. That's really playing the odds.

Hope you went out to buy a lottery ticket the same day. Terenz.

[BTW, have you done your Buenos Aires trip yet?]