JonNYC

Everybody wants to be gangster until the police show up.

flyer4512

A card every 35 days is about 11 cards per year, even when you could get 78K miles per card that's TAD BIT LESS than 30 million miles a year, lol

You can get 2 AA cards every 65 days, no single person was getting 3 Million miles per year.

SeeBuyFly

No, they have convinced themselves that you can apply for 50 cards every 33 days, because supposedly Citi will approve you if you use a different AAdvantage number (hint: they will not).

flyer4512

Of course, makes sense, 50 cards a month , a $200K or so credit limit on all the cards combined and a mere $150,000 spend per month to get the miles..............easy peasy

skunker

I'm guessing you weren't around during the Citi 100k signup bonus fiasco, were you? supposed to be a 1 time thing, yet people were were getting it numerous times. The problem was it had a $10k minimum to get the miles. Scammers decided it would just be easier to buy a $10k refundable ticket, get the miles, cancel the ticket, close the account.

Where there is a will, there is someone trying to come up with a way around the rules.

viraldemos

Uhh...you do realize that they didn't make those 50 accounts for them to earn AA bonuses into each for themselves? It was to receive emailed card offers to share with others.

flyer4512

Look at my signup date, I was here but I was hitting Hilton Hard at the time

AFAIK Cit had the 2 card per 65 day rule during the 100k card also 11 cards per year..............even at 100K that is 1.1 million per person

BTW my post was a sarcasm, NOBODY was getting 50 cards a month or even TWO cards a month over and over

skunker

Not all 50, but based on the miles totals they didn't sell them all.

The OP in the now deleted thread said he lost 1.5M miles plus already ticketed awards.

84fiero

AA is paid when it sells the miles to Citi. What Citi does with those miles, and whether Citi makes money or not, doesn't impact AA's profit from selling the miles. We can only speculate as to the mixture of Citi cardholders - frequent churners, occasional churners, non-churners who keep it longterm but pay no interest/penalty fees, cardholders who carry balances and pay interest but don't degault. The final category of course are the most profitable. As a whole portfolio the Citi AA cards could be very profitable, moderately profitable, or unprofitable. Which doesn't necessarily mean Citi wouldn't try to reduce less profitable customers even if things are good overall. But absent insight into Cit's financials, we have no real idea of the impact of the "mailers" or even how many people have been doing this.

IME Reddit tends to be worse than FT when it comes to exaggeration, tall tales, and such (but has other advantages to FT). I'd take such stories with a grain of salt, without knowing the poster's history and reliability. YMMV!

Citi has a hard time with basic functions a lot of the time. Asking them to walk and chew gum may just send them over the edge! If Citi wanted to make things more restrictive or prevent certain activities, there is nothing to stop them from implementing T&Cs and software to do so - other issuers have done so - AMEX and Chase in particular. AMEX will deny or claw back SUBs if you use an offer code not intended for you, for example. Whatever Citi's business decisions are for not doing so, only they know.

cmtlatitudes

Actually, I was thinking that when I read it, but assumed they were not churning 50 AA accounts / bonuses every 35 days. That the frequency was less radical.

However, good point. Now I realize they were probably setting up 50 FF accounts to share -- er, SELL, -- many of the resulting mailers to others, at $20-$50 bucks a pop. That's much more OK.

viraldemos

There are application velocity rules with Citibank, that one that issues the AA awards from the mailers. There is no way to actively earn bonuses simultaneously into several different AA accounts. 1.5mm could be earned over approx 22-25 card bonuses (ballpark), which would take less than two years if applying for cards continuously for oneself. Just wanted to clarify from the credit card churning side of things and to debunk the exaggeration.

yoshapman

Side note, does anyone know if it's only flights that AA can cancel if they shutdown your account? Assuming any Hotel or Car reservations would be ok (or do they need to be non-refundable)? What about partner flights booked with AA miles? And do they only do cancel everything once your account is confirmed as shutdown, or even audits can trigger flight cancellations?

nsx

Your theory doesn't work for pet birds.

Unless they are turkeys. Or chickens.

IkeEsq

Exactly. Talk of AA losing money because of fraudulent accounts is completely conclusory absent some actual data or argument which so far does not exist here. I have seen nothing to suggest this to be the case. Miles are fungible. There is no difference between a 'Sign-up bonus' mile and a 'Spend' mile. Citi pays the same for each.

The amusing thing in all of this is that despite the indignation at this 'rampant fraud,' AA is doing nothing to the people who actually caused it and likely set off alarms at AA. Not every new account with no Citi AA card got mailers. Let us say that there were a pool of 10,000 accounts in 2018 and Citi sent out 5000 mailers. Pretty good odds and once you got them, you normally continued to. But not everyone does and not everyone has a relative or friend to give them mailers and a growing number of people want mailers.

When mailers go single-use, people start signing up pets and alternate names, and who knows what. The market on Reddit really takes off and people are selling codes for $20-$50. As the number of accounts rise but the number of mailers remain constant, the chance of getting a mailer from an account drops and more accounts are created and demand for purchasing mailers rises.

When physical mailers stop and emailers show up, people do not even need a physical address anymore and can just create completely bogus accounts by the hundreds and thousands all with unique email addresses thanks to Google. So the 10,000 eligible accounts in 2018 (most of which don't get emailers) are now 100,000 accounts or 1,000,000 and the chance of getting an emailer requires 10, 20, 50, . . . accounts. The alleged 500 is probably the tip of the iceberg when people have 30 to sell at a shot in the Reddit market.

The people who created huge numbers of accounts are not people trying to get a code once a month, they are people making $1000s selling codes on the Marketplace and don't even have an AA account to shutdown. Not that AA is shutting down fraudulent accounts, they are just shutting the legitimate accounts associated with the fraudulent ones.

JonNYC

Incorrect..