Originally Posted by
cbellero
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.
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.
The key here probably is to determine the exact definition of "fraud" as applied by the airlines' programs.
While we as pax ("willing victims") definitely have legitimate gripes about our treatment, in theory we have accepted the providing companies "rules" of behavior. The company will be defining fraud most likely relating to revenue-loss related to rule-abuse and/or deliberate malfeasance.
I don't know specifically how airlines deal with this, my experience relating to fraud prevention is from another industry entirely, but I would think that what sort of fraud prevention each airline has in place depends significantly on how they choose to police the programs and their flexibility and willingness to accommodate any customer who has been defrauded, or if that is a concern for them at all.
I would not be surprised to learn that there is some sort of automatic monitoring in place similar to what is often seen with credit cards. I.E., monitoring for sudden unusual changes in the member behavior, as well as larger, program-wide sudden changes in behaviors or patterns of behavior relating to accrual or redemption of awards.
However, I think that you will have a very difficult time getting anyone in one of these programs to talk with you on any of this, particularly if there is any possibility of it being made public, or, worse, delivered directly into the hands of what is arguably one of the savviest groups around, known for "exploiting"/maximizing the benefits and rules relating to airline FF plans....
Good Luck.....