Originally Posted by
Boraxo
Over past 3 years banks have finally started to address churning and eliminated most opportunities. It is not clear to me why they did not do this 10 years ago, but maybe there was still profit from these transactions due to their relationships with travel providers.
They did
start to do it over 10 years ago. Over 10 years ago, you could apply for 2 identical AA cards from Citi on the same day, every 3 months. That speed of it ended more than 10 years ago, and
CandymanJim's thread about not-the-first-Citi-limitaton is famous among those of us where doing that back then and talking about it on FT:
Citibank - the jig is up...
So they didn't
start to address churning only 3 years ago, it's just that they greatly
ramped up their anti-churning efforts in the past 3 years.
For another example, Chase's 24 month wait since you earned the last bonus was an anti-churning step that originated many years ago. It was just not nearly as big an anti-churning step as 5/24 which came more recently.