<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by wormwood:
The average user of the frequency program who never benefits because the opportunity was destroyed by the scorched earth approach of the multimillion point gatherers. This is the main issue for me. It is not FAIR (and I am not one of these people, I read FT so have the opportunity to get in quick if I wanted to)
Second, all frequency program users, except the rapists themselves, lose when dilution comes along or further offers are scrapped in fear of the vacuum cleaner approach used by some people. This DOES affect me and my future relations with frequency programs. This affects almost everyone except the super greedy (it does affect them as well but they are very well insulated by their greed).</font>
I believe you are blowing this out of proportion by a bit. The actual number of people who would be willing to (or did) invest $8,000-$20,000 on airline mileage has to be infinitesimal when compared with the total number of participants in the programs.
I also believe that you are blowing out of proportion the consequences of the ValueMags promotion. If the amount of current activity was a problem, why would they not do as Kellogg's did with the AA promotion and limit redemption of mileage per account? The limit they chose was 200,000 miles. For most people, this is a ludicrous amount. For some of us, 200k miles might not be as many as we wanted, but it's certainly a decent amount.
As far as those who would attempt to defraud the program; bad apples will be around as long as humans walk the earth. Criminals will be a part of our lives for eternity and that's just a fact of life. It's up to the people running the promotion to protect themselves from such slime.