When am I safe from a "fraud" problem with FB?
 

We booked some award tickets last night with Flying Blue. First time. Today, I came to flyertalk to see about best seats to select and I learned about some of Flying Blue's practices with certain award bookings. It turns out we did pretty much everything wrong. As I read some of the horror stories of cancelled tickets, I guess what I'm asking is whether we can ever be confident that they will let us fly.

Here's the long story. My wife has a bunch of capital one points. I was playing around with them yesterday trying to see the best way to redeem them and saw that there was a bonus for transferring to Air France. This was at about 7:00 pacific time, and the bonus ended at 9:00, literally yesterday. I have an established Flying Blue account. I did some searching and found some great award tickets on KLM for 2020.

Capital One won't allow transfers from one person's account to another person's frequent flier account, but I read the Flying Blue terms and they said they allowed one person to ticket for another. My wife had a FB account a long time ago, but at some point apparently it became dormant. We tried to log in and transfer points to it, but it said it didn't recognize her FB number and to create another one. So, she did. We did a test transfer of 1,000 Capital One points, which transferred instantly.

My wife called FB with me in the room. Long hold, but we go through about 30 minutes before the end of the Capital one transfer bonus ended. She got a lovely agent, who looked up the award flights we wanted, and confirmed availability. She told the agent she was booking for her husband and son. (We all have the same last name.) We told the agent we were transferring points and asked her to set up the reservation, confirm it was good to go, and then we would transfer the points. She said ok. We transferred, she booked the tickets, took credit card payment for the taxes, and we got an e-ticket right away. I see the charge on my credit card.

It turns out that we pretty much unknowingly did everything wrong. 1) She opened the account on the same day as the booking. There was no activity in the account, obviously, except a transfer in of 144,000 points. 2) She booked for someone other than herself. 3) She used my credit card to pay the taxes.

Shame on me for not researching a new program before transferring points and booking an award. But we were sort of trying to hop on the transfer bonus and didn't really act carefully. Whatever, nothing I can do about it now.

So, the question is, is there a point when I can relax about this? It's ticketed. It shows on FB. We selected seats. The credit card is charged. The flight is not until 2020, so really there's not much point in getting too worried, though if I'm going to have a problem I'd like to know. What I'm really wondering is if there are data points on when the "fraud" alert will kick in. Could we show up at the airport and not be allowed to fly?

You "did" something right. All surnames, FB account, credit card and pax, are the same.

So, you think we're ok? I got the sense that the brand new account redeeming transferred miles was not cool with FB. I guess hopefully if we trip some kind of algorithm or something, someone in the security department would look and see that this was not a barter or whatever they are worried about.

You're fine, nothing to worry about at all here.

So after reading up on this and other threads, I'm a bit curious. I'd like to use FB miles to have my SO accompany me on a business trip. Otherwise, I have no idea how I would use them for myself before they expire since I am a frequent Delta flyer. I've had an FB account since about 2015, to manage my occasional (once or twice annually) AF/KL reservations, but my profile is set to always credit these to Skymiles. I'm not sure why I would credit any AF or KL flights to FB, since these are critical to maintaining my Delta status. So I recently had some miles credited to FB as a service gesture on a recent AF flight, but I'll likely need to top it off with another 5-10k AMEX points to book the reservation for SO. I just fail to see how this can be perceived as risky, since I've used FB for a while, and I do fly with them when my travel plans take me across the pond.

You should be fine IMO.