After having a Citi AAdvantage Mastercard for several months, I was rather curious why the 7,500 mile signup bonus plus additional accrued miles via spending weren't appearing my AA account.

I called Citi, and the CSR suggested that I call AA and ask them to look into it. I called the Gold Desk, and spoke with Tracy. After some digging in the computer, she informed me that a new AAdvantage account had been created for me when I signed up for the Citi card. The reason for this turned out to be rather interesting. As Tracy explained it - When Citi submits miles to AA for the first time, the address used to sign up for the Citi card is used as a primary key in the AAdvantage DB to locate the member's AAdvantage number. If the address match isn't _exact_, an existing AAdvantage account won't be located, and a new one will be created. In my case, I'd formatted my street number differently on my AAdvantage app than I had on my Citi app: "666-Z" vs "666 #Z".

Once she realized what had gone on, Tracy merged the miles from my alter-ego AAdvantage account, and closed the mistakenly created account. She noted that my primary AAdvantage account would be inactive for up to 48 hours while the merge completed.

I suspect that I'm not the first or last to have this experience, but it's something to watch out for, and easy to resolve.