<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by neophyte:
It turned out that I would never use this gift, but when I came to return the item four months later, my DL was long gone – canceled after 1 free year. I did not even remember which card I used, so when clerk tried to auto-refund it – transaction got rejected. For the moment we stayed stunned – clerk did not know how to react, and I realized that I hit THE loophole.</font>
I found the same loophole. My wife bought something at JCPenney's and later decided that she did not like it anymore. I bought it with my CO Visa. At return time, the CO Visa had been cancelled and I was thankfully able to return it on a different Visa. I could have cared less about miles but was happy to be able to return it.
I guess it would be possible to buy things and return them on different cards to make miles, but I would not do it. Aside from ethical issues, I hate to return things and find it embarrasing. Not only that, but if it were to be done enough to get any real value out of it, the credit card company and/or merchant would probably pick up on it and take some action, possibly affecting your credit rating. It may even be that the airline could get involved and close a frequent flyer account if pressured by the credit card company. I don't know if it would get to this, but I do know that the airlines are the "gods" of their programs, and have carefully reserved the right to do virtually as they wish with their programs and the accounts.
My advice is to stick to earning miles the ethical way. If you find a loophole like the pudding guy who realized that the miles were worth more than the pudding, that is fine, but buying things to intentionally return to get miles is not something that the merchant, credit card, or airline would tolerate if they were alerted of this activity.