Originally Posted by Marathon Man
do you suppose these ebay people had been persons or companies who had once bought the miles like you can in Mike's provided chart? And then they decided to unload them and do it this way? I have never looked at the ebay things because I have not yet had a need, but since you can only really assign awards to people and not individual miles in lots of say 1000 each, I started to figure that was what they were doing, though
Right. The general model is that the buyer buys an award that requires, say, 25,000 miles. The FF program member gets the award in the buyer's name and sends it to the buyer, who travels on the award ticket.
This is against the terms and conditions of most FF programs. Some sellers pretend they're selling a plain envelope that happens to contain an airline award as a free gift to the buyer, but this is a legally worthless sham.
Airlines vary in how diligently they go after people who sell awards. The risk to the seller is cancellation of his/her FF account, including forfeiture of all points/miles. The risk to the buyer is having the ticket invalidated at the airport and having to buy a new one at the last-minute walk-up price or not going on the trip. Many people are either not aware of these risks - despite airlines' efforts to publicize the cases in which they catch someone - or think they're small enough to be worth taking the chance.
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