AAdvantage Accounts Closed Over Bogus Car Rental Receipts
 

https://onemileatatime.com/american-...r-rental-scam/
American Airlines has one of the most active corporate security departments when it comes to shutting down accounts, and it looks like American is now shutting down AAdvantage accounts for a new reason....

The AAdvantage car rental scam

American Airlines is terminating AAdvantage accounts right now over car rental receipts submitted for mileage credit. The basic concept is that:

• AAdvantage miles ordinarily expire after 18 months of inactivity
• If your AAdvantage miles expire, one way to undo that is to see if any activity didn’t post to your account, which would keep your miles from expiring
• American AAdvantage has some car rental partners, and the car rental industry is rather low tech in many ways
• Some people submitted car rental receipts from alleged past rentals to reinstate miles, and those accounts are now being closed

But if people actually rented a car, why would they shut down the AAdvantage accounts?

The article refers to shutdowns for bogus car rental receipts being submitted.

That seems pretty cut & dry.

Commit fraud and your account gets closed.

Who goes through that much trouble to mfr bogus car rental receipts for a few miles? Odd.

That's what I'm saying. How many people have a significant amount of miles in an account they haven't used in over a year? And for this to be a pattern?

I'm more inclined to think one person got caught doing this instead of a whole bunch of people getting caught. Or they all had the same fake receipt and got caught that way.

Ive seen many requests asking if anyone had a rental receipt to do this exact thing among many different carriers, so there must be enough folks out there that werent flying or crediting to their accts. Bear in mind that 12500 was worth a 1 way flight Saver so could be folks got their acct up to that waiting for an opportunity to cash it in. Or had even 8k in teh acct knowing that they could do a transfer in from a CC or hotel program to round-up what they needed

Honestly, I think a few people become very greedy and think that "loyalty program fraud" is somehow not real fraud.

When I was in the airline industry back in the 90's, much of it was "low tech" and it shocked me how many "upgrade stickers" would disappear between the gate podium and the entrance to the jetway. One time an agent caught a religious leader from a major denomination in this type of behavior!

Ah the good ole days of the physical stickers. I never peeled them from a ticket- but was it really my job to make sure they were properly taken? Ditto the paper VIP (now SWU) certificates.

ahh - if I wont get caught, is it really fraud

Someone help me out. How did this scam work? A rental agreement has your name on it. We’re people changing the names on the agreement and then submitting? Or submitting a single rental agreement to multiple FF programs?

Well it would be hard to be caught for not doing anything, and fraud is a rather strong accusation. You are often a contrarian. Even in today's digital age- if you realized that an upgrade instrument had not been properly pulled- would you ring up customer service to ensure the error was fixed?

If a company says that you can have 1 free <insert item> , then the entitlement is to 1 item free of charge - not as many as can one get away with if staff fail to properly process it

Thanks for not answering my question.

Strokes/folks.