As part of my dissertation for my MBA I have decided to do some research about award programs and fraud. The actual disseration of my proposal has not been completed. However, the current draft outline is to:

1. Develop a reasonable model for estimating award program fraud.
2. Performing some estimates for some individual award programs to try to discover any regional or program-size differences.
3. Develop a set techniques based upon fraud prevention techniques from other fields catered towards award programs.

I have been a member of FlyerTalk for many years and am hoping that many of you are able to provide me with some valuable input.

Specifically I am looking for your support with:

1. Any stories or background information that you can supply me with concerning award program fraud. This could be incidents of fraud or different techniques that programs have used in the past to prevent fraud

2. Contact names and/or details of executives in different award programs. I plan on developing a questionnaire and contacting different programs to get first-hand feedback about the topic. Yes, I am a bit concerned about how willing the different programs might be about publicizing such information.

3. I may also create a questionnaire for the FT community to augment the questionnaire.

In return I promise to provide an update on how the work is going and give a copy of the final product to anyone that requests it.

I thank everyone in advance for their contributions.

(Mods, please move thread if this is in the wrong forum)

Regards,