Originally Posted by
tth_ben
Leap of logic.
Why is it wrong to have miles expire when the account is under audit? Is not one of the purposes of the audit in fact for SQ to decide whether there is any wrongdoing or inappropriate action by the OP that would then trigger any penalties? And therefore one bears the risk of that happening. Unless of course the audit stems from a clearly frivolous or vexatious premise, which is obviously not the case here. Your analogy is completely irrelevant since in that case it would seem that the airline would have known, or reasonably should have known about when and how the internal system was going for maintenance. To apply it here, you will effectively need to say that SQ's systems had already flagged and/or an SQ staff knew all along, even before the OP presumably got active on his Krisflyer account and wanted to use the miles, that he had tried to game the system but that SQ had decided that it would not do anything about it, and would only tell the OP when he tried to redeem his miles.
Do you know how many thousands upon thousands of KF (many of them dormant/inactive) there are? I'll be surprised if there's someone dedicated to trawling the account activity in these accounts all the time (as opposed to random audits).
What a load of leap.
So, let's consider a few options:
(1) If the audit is random (or semi-random) and not related to suspected wrongdoing, then the process should arguably be fairly quick (and if KF can't make it quick, they should automatically extend miles that are "tied up" due to the audit). Making the ability to redeem miles subject to the availability of space is one thing, but also leaving it up to the whims of random auditing on the edge of miles expiry would be outright capricious. So if the audit
is random, KF should have an automatic "miles extension" protocol for that sort of thing (particularly if the audit process tends to take more than a few days given the nature of KF's expiry rules). This would be bad on KF (particularly given the *ahem* interesting/convenient timing on the cusp of a large block of miles expiring). As an addendum to this, there's no indication as to when KF actually
placed the account "under audit". More on that in a moment. However, based on what little I've read about FFP auditing practices, this being a "random" thing seems unlikely.
(2) Ok, let's presume that the audit is
not random. We can now break this into two subcategories:
(2a) KF didn't know there was an issue and something recent triggered the audit ("worst timing in the world" plus it
not being random). This is probably the only case where I think KF's conduct is not dubious, but it still comes off as capricious per (1).
(2b) KF knew there was an issue with OP's account (presumably pertaining to the apparent 2015 promo) but said nothing and simply left it "under audit" until he tried to redeem miles. I'd argue that this is probably the worst of the options since it potentially implies that KF let miles be deposited into an account that it had no intention of letting them be redeemed. Put simply, if KF was able to flag a bunch of accounts related to that promotion I have to wonder why they didn't send out a mass contact to the affected folks
when they figured out there was a problem and yank the miles (or accounts) at the time? Please note that in order to do a US-Hawaii redemption in Y for four seats, OP would have had to have had at least 140k miles in the account (for J it would be 240k miles), so it seems likely that OP had at least 83k miles expiring subsequently, so the odds are pretty good of a continuing relationship here (rather than this being the result of a one-time earn).
One thing that smells funny here, by the way, is that the promo in question was, as stated by OP, in 2015. Ok, fine, but KF has a miles expiry timing of three years. Even accounting for a paid extension, miles from a promotion during 2015 would have expired no later than June 30, 2019. OP made no mention of having done a paid extension (and states that they were trying to extend the miles in conjunction with this mess), so that puts the expiry at December 31, 2018 (or earlier). So there's no way that the "tainted miles" should have even been part of the pot anymore (at which point I'd argue that, presuming that the miles in question
did expire, KF should just move on). Auditing the status of "dead" miles after-the-fact seems like rather a pointless exercise (and if those miles got redeemed earlier...well, that's a more complicated area)...but it also implies, at least to my read, that KF put the account under audit seven or eight months earlier and simply didn't say or do anything to alert OP.
I do think that, even if we stipulate that KF didn't need to extend the miles temporarily while they were taking their own sweet time handling an audit which might have been "in process" for some time prior to OP attempting to use the miles, their apparent inability to simply apply the "miles side" of the extension fee (e.g. you can spend $12 or 1200 miles per 10k miles to extend them...so 7200 miles for the 57k pile) strikes me as an IT problem that really ought to be "their problem". I get that this isn't how things play out in reality sometimes, but it definitely still grates.
Basically, if KF ultimately cans/canned OP's account? Then fine, it doesn't really matter one way or another. But to penalize a user by effectively forcing the expiration of miles due to an audit they presumably hadn't even told the user they were the subject of just feels wrong in any other case, and that goes double if it is somehow a random audit with the Worst Timing Ever since that runs a serious risk of someone getting caught up in airline bureaucracy.
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Of course, all of this does involve one specific leap: That OP told us something resembling the whole story and that he wasn't previously contacted in a timely manner by KF but ignored the contact (though I'd be open, in turn, to the possibility of KF somehow failing to make it clear what the email was about). It is entirely possible that more is going on, but I can only judge what is in front of me and take reasonable deductions, presumptions, and so on from there.