Originally Posted by
oc2005
It's funny how this largely seems to be a gray area to the people hoping to get something they weren't entitled to. It seems pretty black & white to me that the targeted offer was the email from Chase/Hyatt, not a hacked link.
That's not how reasoning works. There was no way to know we "weren't entitled to it" ahead of time. I fully agree that in hindsight that's the reality. But at the moment when it happened, this was pretty straightforward. It appeared to be an unpublished landing page (which is something we here at FT use often) that offered better terms than the regular landing page.
This landing page also had a pre-populated name that got there as a URL parameter in plain text. That's not the mechanism by which I've ever seen a targeted offer done. I'm a programmer, and if you were too you might realize how the term "hack" doesn't really apply here.
This is getting repetitive. The reality is, it was a legit offer with grey area due to this strange landing page, which redirects to a legit page at Chase. They didn't honor their terms. The end.
I'm stuck with that, and that's all. I am merely reporting facts. I'm not whining.