Purchasing Membership Rewards from co-workers?
 

I am not sure if it belongs here, but Mods, please feel free to move.

I work for a very huge consulting firm that only uses Amex. A lot of my colleagues have signed up for membership rewards and only redeem gift cards. I told a bunch of them that I will give them cash instead and buy their points at 10k increments. So far, I have 300k points available for purchase. I intend to have them transfer the points to my airline account. What are the risks? I know Amex frowns upon purchasing of points. I know Amex allows you to transfer points to someone else's airline account.

or they could just purchase the tickets for you which is usually no problem.

They don't have enough miles individually, but they have enough miles in aggregate.

I'm guessing that AMEX will shut down the buyer & seller's accounts if they find out. I would not do it.

What are the chances they will find out? Maybe they will cancel their membership rewards program but there is no way Amex will take away our corporate cards.

It would be simple to see that a number of Membership Rewards accounts were linked to the same airline account. I would be more concerned about the airline noticing that you are receiving miles from so many different American Express accounts than I would about American Express.

and AMEX may demand that AMEX MR's last name = airline account's last name
I have heard such answers for AMEX Canadian side

I wouldn't do this. I believe there was one report a few months ago of someone being shutdown from MR for doing this.

in the uk, one can pay £15 to have their MR pts to be transferred to anyone's mr account.....

Usually any time AmEx wants to get rid of someone they execute a "Financial Review". (They abuse this to no end.) If your company has enough documentation to support all of their cards though then this shouldn't be an issue.

Not the case in US.

Anyway, I believe someone mentioned this before. From AmEx end there is next to 0% chance of there being an issue. The real issue is in DL/BA/VS/AC seeing multiple MR transfers into your FF account. Proceed with caution.

Thanks so much for this info! I work for one of the big four firms at a very high travel office. I just gave my location away! hahaha.

Chase has been very aggressive in this area, but at least so far, not Amex.

I have made about 15-20 transfers of the type you mention in the past two years without any problems. I have purchased miles from co-workers, traded miles with friends, and even occasionally sold miles.

Of course, this is the kind of logic the turkey uses, reasoning that because every day in August September and October that the farmer approached, he got all the corn he could eat, so of course as Thanksgiving approached he assumed the same thing.