jannosk

GBobon

source?

jannosk

blackball

Remember the Kotsovolos promotion I had posted a while ago, where miles were essentially going for 0.9 cents/mile, plus you got a TV and PS4? Well, I remember coming across an ad in a tech site forum, where someone was selling the same TVs, at ~50-60% of the Kotsovolos price. The ad was structured in such a way that it was blatantly obvious that the guy was echoing the Kotsovolos promotion. I realized he was racking up miles this way, and doing it with a very low risk: He would wait for interest, then buy the TV and sell it at a lower price, and of course keep the hundreds of thousands of miles. At the time I was wondering what the motivation was exactly, apart from the fact that he was getting miles at ~0.5 cents/mile. If he is one of the accounts you're talking about, it would make perfect sense!

jannosk

Yes that’s the trick! I think he has multimillion miles but he was not shut down for that
they shut him down because he was selling award tickets and he was making a profit
the have an algorithm to track irregularities in your booking as a member
like booking too many tickets in others people names, especially in other Star Alliance members
the thing is that can affect other people that are not doing that for profit, like booking flights for your friends or miles as a present to your loved ones

Knobbgb

I imagine this kind of thing goes on all the time, with all frequent flier programs (and loyalty programs in other industries I guess). It's no surprise really and I'm glad their algorithms can pick up on this as it protect the program for the legitimate users that most of us are. If this kind of thing gets through the net then it can only lead to devaluation - fewer miles awarded/more expensive redemptions. I know there's a chance that innocent people can be picked up by any automatic procures to detect this and there are past threads about accounts being audited - sometimes quite "robustly". Lets hope Aegean strike a balance and treat innocent members with a little more respect than they have in the past.

The 'trick' mentioned by jannosk above probably isn't actually against the M&B terms (but it probably IS against whatever rules Kotovolos have - or should be, so it's their problem to deal with). He did actually buy the TVs after all and the airline can't really dictate what he does with them afterwards. Kotsovolos must pay Aegean for the miles they give out and they write the rules for the promotion. They just need a "one offer per customer/Miles&Bonus member" clause - and to enforce it, of course.

A3 recently relaxed rules about switching miles between accounts. It's perfectly legal to "give" away your miles to, or to buy miles as a gift for any other member. There's noting in the terms that says there cannot be a payment involved. Amassing millions of miles in that way - even if you were to advertise, is probably legitimate and A3 must have considered the fact that a small number of members would do that. The crunch clearly comes when selling award tickets - as it rightly should.

GBobon

This is against of T&Cs of probably all FFPs, whats new?

MultiFlyer

That is a interesting interpretation of the T&C.
Any other use, disposal, sale, assignment, exchange, promotion or transfer of Miles by the Member or any third party is expressly prohibited.

Knobbgb

Fair enough. I hadn't seen that. But it does seem to go against the new "Transfer Miles" facility which DOES allow you to "dispose" or "assign" your miles to any other member. When adding that facility, they must have considered that they'd leave themselves open to private payments taking place for these transactions and decided that the 20 Euro admin fee for each transaction made it worthwhile overall. I think we can agree that the T&C are not particularly well written, but buying large amounts of miles from lots of people would for sure be against the spirit of the program at least.

mobilemario

They wanted to much selling reward tickets is illegal by T&C