Originally Posted by
Antarius
Yes and no. Citi has a time period (48 months?) On each card type. So you can open one regular Citi, one business and others, but one cannot open 5 identical citi cards on a single account.
Now, if you open 5 accounts, and get one of each card type on each account, then that's where one would get in hot water.
Yes, but it's never clear cut. Citi approved these credit cards and bonus mile awards on the multiple FF accounts. I read the last couple hundred posts (out of 2000+) from the relevant thread and it seems clear Citi knew exactly what was going on. Some of their credit card / bonus offers no longer contained the max number in time period exclusions, the verbiage had changed slightly. A few threads spoke of customers called in to apply/accept the invitations on targeted offers they received, with Citi asking questions akin to "why are you applying for a 22nd Citi card?" -- and then approving the application along with the bonus miles. Even if Citi's algorithm only linked targeted offers to FF numbers, they were still knowingly approving the names, mailing addresses, and ss#'s on the applications, in these 35-60 day cycles.
Personally, it doesn't sit great with me, that I'm plodding along with my one little Aviator card, mainly earning miles the old fashioned way, unsavy, boring way -- flying and normal credit card spend. Especially when it appeared from the thread many who were scoring the million miles weren't even flying AA, except for credit card spend and bonus miles on churning cards every 35 days on creation of multiple accounts. It's annoying these are the people I'm competing with for F and J awards.
At the same time though, Citi was approving the volume and frequency of Cards to people applying. Even the most minimal data mining effort on Citi's part would have caught this, and from what I read of the thread, it's been going on for 2-3 years in one form or another. And it appears at least in some cases, Citi recognized it and let it go on. My sense was although their were some definite gamers (slightly changing name variances or new email addresses), many others weren't, were still being approved, and weren't sure there was anything wrong. They were just doing what everybody else was they'd read about someplace, and after all -- if Citi approved it, wasn't it legit??? I admit feeling badly for those people in the latter category.
It'll be interesting to learn what, if any, compensation / discussion there is behind the scenes between Citi and AA on this.