Very unfortunate story but quite interesting as another FT'er recently asked what constitutes "unusal activity" in your US DM account and what would get you flagged as potentially someone who is selling award tickets.

You will probably get some good points of contact within US from this forum but one is [email protected] , this is Doug Parker although he probably has some assistants reading his mail.

The core issue seems not to be the validity of the routing-- I would leave that out of the entire complaint as the routing would be assumed to be valid given that you were able to book it. What IS at issue here is how many tickets were booked, by whom and in what names. Basically you tripped their alarms as being suspicious. I can only guess why; perhaps if you are not doing a lot of business with US, and all of a sudden there are hundreds of thousands of miles being transferred into accounts then redeemed for high-dollar tickets, this set off some kind of alert.

To be honest, this would be the kind of activity one would expect to see from someone who was truly selling award tickets. I am not in any way accusing the OP of doing that; simply stating that the account activity pattern would be similar.

Keep your complaint brief and stick to the facts. Explain the relationship between all the parties involved and how it came to be that everyone started buying and redeeming miles. There is no rule against sharing a good deal with someone but unfortunately the burden of proof is now upon you and your friends to prove that you are legit.

For the rest of us who have seen the constant promos as a shopping spree for great award deals, this is a good wake-up call. I've definitely taken advantage of these miles deals and redeemed for some nice tickets but I'm not going to play travel agent for my friends.