They make award ticket space more available for those who do follow the rules and such customers might be more willing to fly AS or to pay more to fly AS (less elastic demand) as a result. On the books, when they cancel an account, they would take away the value of those miles. They might or might not get a refund for a partner ticket cancelled at the last minute and if it were an award ticket on their own metal, they might or might not be able to sell the seat or permit someone to change to the flight at a profitable price.

I’m trying to learn how to reply to peoples individual posts so please forgive me if I don’t do this properly. I absolutely did not sell my friend her ticket. She was traveling with me and had a flight home on South African airways already from JNB to JFK for the 5th but she thought she was flying home on the 7th and i hadn’t get been able to show her Cape Town- one of my fav cities in the world ! (And where I want to have a music event next year). So I offered to get her a mileage fix on Alaska directly from CT to JFK via DXB on the 7th. It only cost me 47,500 miles and about $76usd in taxes. The 2k reference I made was because Kimberly took an Uber to the airport in CT, where she was told by Emirates Alaska had cancelled her flight. She called me at the hotel and we conferences Alaska who had us on hold for over 20 min - because their customer care dept was not open until 7am PST & it was noon in Cape Town...Alaska had us on hold for so long that Emirates wasn’t even able to let her purchase a tix for the 1:15pm flight (5 min too late). She ubered back to the hotel. I had to extend the hotel another night (vs staying with my friend as planned in CT) because my whole day was consumed with fixing this (hotel alone in camps bay was $345) Kimberly purchased a tix for the 6:25pm flight which was almost $800. She ubered back to the airport at 3pm- but there were fires in Cape Town & the roads closed - so she literally couldn’t make the 30 min journey in 3 hours and therefore missed the 6pmish flight. Emirates charged her $200 to change it to the following day. So JUST for her tix, her change fee, her 5 Ubers & the hotel room - all of which were unnecessary if Alaska had provided what they confirmed - is close to 2k. This does NOT count all the time, effort and energy both Kimberly & I lost in this process or the hours of phone data on with Alaska. There’s no way I would bother to post this if I was selling a ticket and got busted. I’m not stupid. Kim & my social media shows all of our travels & we travel together often.

Im not sure if this will work, but I’m going to try to attach the actual conversation with Alask so everyone can hear what I heard. I’m still in shock... and Kimberly is still en route to JFK.

Flyertalk was once a friendly place that welcomed new members looking for help and advice. It’s even in the rules.

https://www.flyertalk.com/help/rules.php#welcoming

Now just a few posts into the thread they get accused of fraudulent behavior. Quite sad.

OP - Welcome to Flyertalk. Regarding posting the recording you have, I would carefully review the laws applicable in your state. I am not a lawyer and can’t offer advice.

Alleged violations. And by that I don’t mean that they intentionally seize miles they sold that were not actually used in violation of the T&C, but I doubt that AS’s security department is infallible... and they (and other airlines) are apparently quite hostile or at least customer unfriendly and make it extremely difficult for customers to deal with such cases. It concerns me when I book my wife with miles from my account for solo trips as she has a different last name...