Originally Posted by FriendlySkies

Just posting my experience. In late June, I woke up to two emails from AAdv. thanking me for two redemptions. I hadn't redeemed any AA miles in quite a while, so I immediately got on the phone with AA who said two pax were booked LGA-RDU-BNA the same day. I'd never heard of either party, so the flights were, obviously, fraudulently booked. I later learned the folks were pulled off at RDU by the Airport PD and AA Managers and made to buy their own tickets onward to BNA. They also claimed to have paid somebody $400~ via Apple Pay for the tickets.

AA required a police report which I turned in about a week ago. When I checked this evening, I found my miles returned to my account. I don't keep nearly as many as I used to when I was EXP, but it wasn't too bad of a process. I did end up updating passwords for all of my loyalty accounts with stronger, randomly generated passwords to hopefully prevent this from happening again. In terms of my AA #, I've had it since 1994, so I obviously was upset when they told me the number would have to change. I was able to get AA to keep my number the same in exchange for them saying they wouldn't be responsible for refunding miles if this happened again and I didn't catch it. Since I don't fly AA much, I felt this to be an acceptable trade off to me. If I still had a huge number of miles/AA was my primary carrier, then I would've gone ahead with the change.