Originally Posted by
ctownflyer
1. I was angry at the completely irresponsible reporting on several major blogs that people doctored receipts in order to get miles. Perhaps that got the better of me, but I was shocked to read such poor research, claims, and assumptions about the issue.
2. I find it absurd that AA gives a warning for selling miles, which actually costs them revenue, while this was an immediate shutdown when it didn't cost AA anything.
If I had customers who were falsifying activity and claiming it to be their own activity, I'd terminate their accounts too.
Originally Posted by
ctownflyer
Plenty of FTers have talked about making hotel transfers to non-matching accounts for decades. What if an airline went back and terminated everyone who ever did that? Would people not be up in arms? Would it really be worth it for the airline to do that without a warning or would that just be auditors looking to justify their existence?
This is what auditors do. They look for instances where somebody as violated the law, or T&Cs, and they act in response. Same with IRS auditors; same with credit card fraud department employees; same with accounting firm auditors; same with police officers. They're there to protect the integrity of the programs they represent or protect the revenue of the goverment entity that employs them.
What I find amazing are the message boards / discussion forum there contains numerous threads (some over 100 pages long based on my thread settings) giving tips on things like 1) frequent fliers buying or being given receipts from people they don't even know in an effort to fraudulently claim the activity that was their own so as to preserve their frequent flier accounts, and 2) hidden city ticketing which people know to be contrary to the T&Cs of airplane tickets.
If you're going to play -very- fast and loose with T&Cs, ticketing rules, and program rules, please do -not- throw a fit or blow a gasket with auditors when you find that you got burned when those auditors wised up to the "game".
Blaming the auditors who are doing their jobs while ignoring fraud is an odd position to be taking.