As a UA Fan, you seem to be confusing Citi with Chase. Chase has such language in their applications, Citi does not. (If you read carefully, Citi is just saying that you get only one sign-up bonus per card account, and cannot get the sign-up bonus on an existing card account. It says nothing at all about one bonus per card type, or one bonus per card applicant, the way that Chase does. Nor does it say "if you ever had this card before, your bonus will be the difference" like Amex does for the Delta card.)

Meanwhile, I think you're assuming that the people you call see more than they see. It's already been noted here that the people you call don't see the cards you cancelled (unless you tell them to look for them). Well, I also have my doubts that they see the bonus potential of the cards you applied for (less than) 60 days ago. The 60 days is a credit application issue, not a bonus issue. The 60 days problem will hit you just as much if you are simply applying for no-fee no-bonus no-rewards plain vanilla cards from Citi. It's related to not wanting to give out too much creidt too fast, not anything having to do with bonuses.

Many FTers don't seem to realize how small a part of the Citi universe they are. Citi is much more worried about the much larger group of people right now who are aplying for credit because they just lost a job and want to start living completely on credit; those are who they don't want to apply for cards too often.

I just applied for two cards (AA MC and AA Amex) the other morning. 7 minutes apart, my application IDs were 56 apart, which implies there were 8 apps a minute during that time. Just how many of them (besides mine) during that time were by FTers? There are tons of people applying for Citi cards all the time, and only a small percentage of them are applying for AA cards, and only a tiny percentage of those are anywhere close to churning.

The loophole, if any, is that Citi hasn't figured out (or perhaps hasn't tried to figure out) a language and a process that would limit bonuses for churners yet not limit them for anyone else (like people trying a variety of cards). Note that Citi is one of the few credit card companies that lets you apply for three different flavors (Amex and MC online, Visa by phone) for affinity cards for the same partner. Chase only allows Visa for UA, and so it's simpler for Chase to say "one bonus only", Citi would have to work out a way that you could get one bonus only per card flavor, or whatever, since they want you try all the card types (well, maybe they don't want you try the Visa so much any more, that's why you can only get it over the phone with the secret handshake).

It's long been rumored that AA is the last company to give lifetime status on basis of all miles (rather than just paid flown miles) because it's too much work in the IT department that would be necessary to make it work otherwise. Could it be that it's too much work in the IT department at Citi (because of their many flavors of cards per affinity partner, etc) that is a similar explanation of why they still alow "heavy" churning of AA bonuses? (Each company has to way how much the "loophole" is costing them, versus the cost of fixing the loophole. As long as Oprah doesn't promote churning Citi AA cards, perhaps the "loophole" costs relatively little in big scheme of things, compared to revamping a major IT system -- and making sure the revamping didn't cause more prolbems than it fixed.) Consider that Citi hasn't even yet implemented seeimngly "simple" technology like allowing you to choose which order the cards are displayed in on your Accounts Summary (while Chase has had that for many years, Citi produces random ordering which can change from one login to the next!).