vincentzh306

I am worry the same thing you mentioned above. The agent I spoke confirmed with me there is no office not even sales office in Canada anymore since they closed all overseas office during COVID. She told me the instruction left on the ticket is Verification in person.
she even said KLM or any local agent can help. I suspect YYC probably won’t station they are own employees must be a ground handling service provider.
I’m trying to do more research to see if anyone had similar issues before and got sorted out.

orbitmic

Can you give us a sense of the miles you were charged for the ticket (and for which class of service)? Are you sure the rewards sale you mention was legit (eg promo awards), not a pricing mistake?

im just a little confused by the sequence of events as you say that you never fly AF, had to transfer credit card miles to gets the required miles to get the tickets but are only going to CUN to take that flight so it must have been quite a fabulous deal and unfortunately the more fabulous a deal the greater the chance something might be problematic about it.

otherwise, as others mention it is likely that the transactions raised alarm bells with the frauds team.

Either way, I really don’t think AF staff would help you if there is an issue with an award ticket, I think they’ll just send you back to fb to solve any issues and you’ll be back to square 1…

Utskicat

Are you 100% sure you’re talking to a Flying Blue? Because the URL link in this email is not an actual Air France domain. And the wording in English is very bad. Even for for Air France. Are you clicking that link and getting some sort of phone number on the resulting page? If so, the whole thing could be a scam, make sure you’re looking up the Flying Blue phone number directly from flyingblue.com.

None of this makes a lot of sense. You should be able to talk to somebody at Flying Blue that’s able to tell you what’s going on.

hhdl

Ypsilon is an IT provider for the travel industry with fraud detection listed as one of their services.

SilverChris

Has the booking actually been cancelled?

hhdl

https://ypsilon.net/product/17/

Note that both testimonials are AFKL, and loyalty fraud is explicitly called out.

vincentzh306

Yep. I confirmed with 5th agent (FB). They suspect its a credit card issue.
The ticket is fully refunded with miles as well.

In the end, they don't even know why.

vincentzh306

Miles were refunded and taxes were refunded.

vincentzh306

It was a normal FB Promo Rewards monthly deal.
FB agents can't find any issues, but only way to refund and rebook.

brunos

It might be useful to try to guess what is the fraud suspected by AF/Ypsilon.
Creating a family household is a bit irrelevant to that potential fraud.

Someone opened a new account, transferred MR and booked a ticket in your name.
It could be that this person is "selling" the ticket to you.
That would violate th T&C and is a "fraud".
If you can prove that you have close ties to that person, this would clear one hurdle. If not, you are in trouble because it really looks like someone is bartering miles.

But, AF is also trying to prevent someone creating a new FB account just to receive credit card miles and book a ticket. They dislike that action. So they force you to go through loops, such as going to the airport, knowing that it is difficult for many pax, especially based in America where most of the cases happen.

I am not suggesting that you are "guilty" of anything, just taking the AF/Ypsilon viewpoint.

carnarvon

It however looks very plausible.

Why is the OP refusing to say how many miles were charged?

Flying from Canada to CUN only yo catch a flight... hmmm....

Dave510

I think I see what happened, correct me if this is wrong:
1. Your partner created a new FB account, and never flew with FB
2. Your partner then joined your family
3. Your partner then transferred from her MR to her FB account
4. Your partner then redeemed and paid for the award ticket using her credit card
Crucially: 5. Your partner is NOT flying on the award ticket

If you are FB's fraud department, you can appreciate how these facts make it look 100% like a mileage broker selling an award ticket to you, creating a dummy/throwaway account that has never been verified, joining your family and making the redemption for you right?

If your partner were to fly the same ticket with you, you'd be ok.

You might be able to do something about it if you showed up at their office and showed them 1. your partner is a real person and 2. your partner actually lives at the same address as you. This will prove your partner isn't a mileage broker selling an award ticket to you, and hence no TOS were broken.

Goldorak

I didn't say you violate a rule/T&C. But we had several reports here of awards tickets canceled in similar situation as yours because FB considers them as possibly fraudulent. I know it's certainly frustrating when there is no fraud at all.

brunos

I remember reading somewhere that in the old days, airlines were "confiscating" miles that they deemed used fraudulently.
Then a few parties sued them to recover the miles and the airline had to prove that it was a fraudulent transaction violating their T&Cs about buying/selling miles.
In theory, airlines can close an account without showing cause, but that might be a bit weak in courts..

Just refunding the ticket and flagging the account in case there are further such transactions is sufficient.
Of course, if the buyer already paid cash for the bartering, he is in a difficult position.

Again, I am not suggesting in any way that this is what happened in this case. Just what airlines do when they suspect bartering.

etiene

I think some of the other reports have been people using CC miles from their own account to book for themselves, so even this might not be true. Nevertheless, OPs case really doesn’t surprise for setting off the fraud flags.

I don’t recall whether others have managed successful resolution on these fraud-flagged awards, though I don’t think I followed all that closely.