who earned most miles without flying
 

or paying for miles in any way except signing up for telephone offers one would have taken even without mile bonuses.

No flying, paying for tickets, paying fees, etc.

Does pudding count as a fee?

only if you did not eat it, and just wanted the miles. Purchases are ok only if you would have purchased it anyway at the same price even if no miles were offered :-)

Purchases of cash are ok, if $0 in fees was paid. Credit cards are ok if no annual fee was paid at all (for the first year or longer). If an annual fee was paid, then neither the bonuses nor the miles earned from purchases count.

Miles earned without paying anything at all.

[This message has been edited by slow (edited 05-23-2002).]

Around 125k for me I guess. Most from the company giving out ff miles for completion bounus a couple of years back on a real boring assignment. The rest mostly idine and such. I do consider even non anual fee credit cards to have some costs in the cash rebate I give up though.

If you allow for the fee to be paid by other people, my total will start to go up soon as the company I work for just gave some employess credit cards for business use, that I got them to link to my FF#. So since they pay the anual fee the miles are free to me.

Another intesting twist would be what products have people bought just for the miles, they did not care if they got the product, seems valuemags, and the flyertalk magazine fit this
at least, and sometimes the Kellogs products.

I have earned over 3 million using my citibank VISA. I have flown just 60,000.

Wow. What did you buy on your Citibank Visa? (Just curious. Ignore question is too intrusive.)

A little further down this forum is a thread about a guy who's done 25 million by charging postage to his card:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/006966.html

Tough to beat.

I won 1 million AA miles in a contest. I had to pay taxes on the prize though.

What were the taxes on 1M miles?

I didn't have the taxes worked out both ways (I should have), but the ARV was $10,000 and I think I am in the 25% tax bracket or so (?) so I am guessing about $2500. Needless to say I owed this year. No state income taxes though.

From a puritan point of view, its like the kid who's father buys him the whole set of baseball cards as opposed to the kid who buys lots of packs and collects them. Both end up with the whole set, but get there using a different dynamic.

Over 2.5M Pop-tart and waffle miles.

Over 500K miles in various "laundering" credit card transactions into cash for little or no fee. Note, those laundering loop-holes have since been closed.

MTP