Originally Posted by
SeeBuyFly
It seems a lot like the Citi shutdowns. In both cases, openly using something issued to another person was permitted for many years, and the word gets out that AA is cool with this and so presumably it is not a TOS violation or anything. Then one day years later they suddenly bring out the nuclear weapons, because apparently people should have been voluntarily declining to do something that AA has been freely letting people do for years.
For those who have not read every post, I should note that apparently it was not a matter of submitting bogus receipts as implied in the subject line. See post 48: apparently you could just submit a genuine receipt issued to someone else and they would accept it for this purpose. For years.
I am sure someone will say, AA just discovered that gambling was going on here, they had absolutely no idea until just now. I mean, how could they possibly have known? It's not like they have crack teams to look into that sort of thing.
SO FAR (and I am waiting to hear if there is more to the story) it doesn't sound even a little bit like the Citi shutdowns. In the case of the Citi stuff there were SERIOUS and CONTINUOUS and INTENTIONAL and MATERIAL ongoing fraud involved in the "high end" of the practice. People who made millions of miles and involved transfers of cash to buy referrals and other items. (Not everyone - but at the "high" end.)
Here, from what has been publicly stated (I had no knowledge of this issue until these recent posts) you have people who were very occasionally (less than once a year) submitting a document which SHOWED that it wasn't them, which AA accepted as meeting all the rules. Now, I actually suspect that there is MUCH more involved here than the one-time submission of a random auto rental receipt which SHOWED that it was someone else's name, someone else's address, who never submitted for mileage credit, etc. BUT, IF THAT IS TRUE, then it doesn't sound similar to me to the Citi shutdowns.