During the summer I awoke in my Las Vegas hotel with a few emails from Emirates thanking me for booking redemption flights.

The issue was I hadn't booked these flights so called the help line immediately to contest. The flights had been booked in person and the tickets issued at DXB T3 to various West African countries i.e. Ghana. The flights had left the same day but EK promised to investigate.

Based upon (a) me being in Las Vegas at the time of booking, (b) me having zero connections in West Africa and (c) the tickets being issued in person in T3 it was safe to assume that this was a clear fraud and more than likely an inside job from a member of EK staff.

Two months later the problem is still not resolved, miles still not refunded and I have to say that EK have been useless in recovering this to the point where I will no longer fly with them.

Anyone else had a similar experience?

Best,

GGL Flyer

No - I rarely keep sufficient miles in my account for more than 1 return trip. I am surprised they have not been more proactive for an I/O.

When I've done upgrade at the airport, they normally just take the Skywards number. I wonder what extra checks are performed to check that the number given is correct, and belongs to the passenger attempting to use the points?

If it's just a case of eyeballing the names to see if they are the same, then maybe it just happened to be a similar name, or the agent skipped the step? So, they could have typed the wrong number by mistake.

I doubt the agents will be able to trawl through Skywards accounts looking for persons with a large number of points, so I think you can rule out it being somebody from EK. It would be immediately apparent who had process the bookings, so not something they could hide.

Doesn't your Skywards account keep other details as well, such as passport number? Provided that your account password is secure and uncompromised, checking your passport number against the one registered with Skywards would be much more secure.

I wonder if Emirates have a legal responsibility to help?

I know - tell me about it...

Given that Emirates issued the tickets to someone in person, that was not called GGL Flyer in person, in DXB T3 just before the booked flights departed then damn right they have a legal responsibility

Madness aimed at EK not you Joriarty

upgrade/buy a reward ticket at the airport were a real struggle last time. tried to upgrade my friend - however i was not on the same flight but at the check-in in person - was not possible (I know this is the correct handling...)

however this was at an outstation..

True, they should have such responsibility. But AFAIK they do have the right to do whatever they want to your miles account for whatever reason, right? So maybe that extends to not giving a toss when they make a mistake.

Unless the fraudsters were travelling on fake passports, they should be pretty easy to trace (well, as easy as tracing people in West Africa can be). It may be that EK are waiting for the local police to do something.

Have you called EK again, recently? Don't they have an IO-only phone number that you can call? It is rather shortsighted of them to piss off a commercially important customer. You'd think that they would restore your miles first, and then try to figure out what happened to them.

^

You should contact your I/O rep directly. It's quite shocking, really, that they've dropped the ball on this. This is Tim Clark material.

Inside job or complicity is most likely the problem here although the pax in question may not be at fault (someone could have sold them the ticket for cash, for example, and used the miles to issue the ticket).

Back in 2010 an EK agent was convicted of embezzling 2.6 million miles by creating 2,000+ skywards accounts with correct details for unknowing pax (yes...a lot of people don't have FF accounts) but using his email and password. He then transferred miles or issued tickets on his behalf. Got busted when someone tried to create an account and found that one was already existing.

http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/crime/f...-fine-1.692337

Not just dropped the ball, but burst it, stomped on it, threw it in the trash then burnt the garbage bin!

Please do update us OP after emailing/calling/writing to Tim Clark's office, how grovelling the apology and service recovery attempt is, if any!

fwiw, in my opinion, definitely an inside job!

It happened to me as well. Someone with a similar name stole my skywards miles to get award flights. Emirates performed an investigation concluded that it was stolen but never ended up refunding the miles. They bumped me to Gold from Silver for a year so that I can earn back the miles faster. If you don't get the miles back, at least ask for your tier to be upgraded. It's not much but something is better than nothing!

The OP is already iO, there's nothing to upgrade to - he is beyond top-tier!

Also a pity because fast action could have resulted in cancelling the tickets and catching the thief.

One would hope that EK has an IT system in place that can tell who exactly issues a ticket and to whom!

However...we all know what EK's IT is like...