LaserSailor

There are certainly accounts of FF giving away their XPUs to a friend who then sells them on ebay. Ultimately, UA will hold you accountable for this, so be careful who you give them to.

tom911

UA takes away almost a half-million miles, plus your 1K status, and you still want to give them your business? Amazing. If that happened to me at my primary carrier, I'd fly any other carrier or combination of carriers, even with longer routings, before continuing to contribute one single cent of revenue to the airline.

EMan

How does this work?
I thought the owner of the GPU had to personally upgrade the friend's reservation!?

LaserSailor

No idea, as I certainly have never done it. Where there is a will, there is a way, though. I certainly don't want to be the one posting how to violate TC on a public forum.

bmwe92fan

+1 - OP insists they did nothing wrong, lost half a million miles, status was stripped - and they feel good to just be silver now? Tough to understand

JonNYC

Color me befuddled as well.

Baze

The way I read it is they are not going to have much "personal" travel this year but still fly for work. Sounds like work already gets them into the better cabins or pays for E+ and the pain would have been during personal travel. And if you are Silver and already in the better cabins then the only downside is maybe you don't get your first meal choice, and a few less RDM's because of a lower multiplier.

But also seems the only way UA could find out that the RDM's may have been sold or bartered is there is some social media existence out there offering them up. Just a quick email to friends offering the would not trigger anything. Just speculation. OP, did you post anywhere like Facebook, LinkedIn, anything like that offering your upgrades? UA could construe that as bartering or selling them. Lots of people don't understand how really public social media is.

EMan

The only reason I ask is because I plan to give away my unused GPUs/RPUs, but if there's a way the recipient can sell/trade/barter them without my involvement, I would need to re-think my donation policy.

SEA1K4EVR

There isn't unless you give out your mileage number and PIN. There is no way to just "give away" any upgrade instrument to another person where they have free reign to apply it to an itinerary. Back in the day when they were paper..yes. But not now and it hasn't been like that for years. I don't understand the references in this thread saying people have gotten in trouble for giving them away to a person who then gave/sold them to a broker.. I just don't see how that would be possible unless the giver provided their login information/PIN which would be incredibly stupid.

tw747

Very "FRIENDLY" United!!!!!!

LaserSailor

I think this is perfectly safe in this case. Its really safe if you keep it to immediate family of course.

zombietooth

A broker, posing as a regular FT'er, gets you to donate (yes, people ask for free GPUs all the time in CC, usually with a sob story of some sort, and often post that you will get "Good Karma" in return) or trade your GPU for something in CC, say a mileage award on another airline (which he may get from a third party, not involved with the GPU transaction, as well). He then agrees to sell it to someone else without your knowledge for cash. He sends you a PM with a PNR and a name to upgrade, which is all you need to upgrade someone. You have no way of knowing if the PNR and name he has provided belongs to him unless the FT'er has posted personal identifying info in his profile. The end user somehow reveals to UA that he paid for an upgrade during an encounter with any of UA's personnel and, bango, you and he are busted.

The broker may get banned from FT for his actions, but UA couldn't really do anything to him without more evidence.

tom911

Sounds like you're referring to "third party trades" on Coupon Connection which are banned in the rules. Party A would trade an item to Party B, who in turn would trade it off to Party C and tell Party A to take care if Party C. I can see how it would work with systemwides. Handle it all offline via PM and you hope no one finds out, and the worst that would happen is that you'd get banned from the forum (it's a long list - LINK).

One of the more recent cases there involved a UA flyer who traded away all his systemwides for the following years systemwides from another poster. He never received one, but the person he traded with used all of his. There is no guarantee of safety on that forum and the only repercussion if you violate the rules is to get banned from the forum. Pretty much buyer (trader) beware.

The poster being discussed the last few days only has 7 posts and would not have access to that forum.

I should add them some brokers on other sites ask for the account info so they can log in and make the booking themselves.

EMan

Is there a way to be sure the upgrade recipient has NOT bought/traded/bartered your upgrade from a broker who has portrayed himself as the recipient?
I guess you could ask the recipient (say by phone) how he obtained the upgrade?

Also, in the worst case, it would be easy enough to disprove UA's "evidence" that you had sold/traded/bartered the upgrade. My guess is that UA would be checking for ads that sell the upgrades. Showing your ad giving the upgrade away for free, along with the paper trail, should be safe enough, no?

I agree it's totally safe to give an upgrade to known friends, acquaintances and family. However, in practice, you might not be able to determine that you cannot use the upgrade until it expires within a month or so. Not that many people can use someone else's GPU at short notice.

ani90

...except if you really did misuse your original MP account or knowingly or unknowingly involve one's account in some form of sale of GPUs or whatever...if one is in a UA hub and have to fly UA then one might be more than happy to just get an account back.

If though I did nothing wrong (according to the MP rules) I would definitely not keep quiet and simply accept my half million miles (that is a lot of money) disappear, especially if I have the ability to prove my case. I wouldn't accept a downgrade to silver, loss of life-time miles and loss of RDMs. If UA refused to reinstate me I would definitely not fly them again - there are, as you imply, always options.

That OP is asking for an account and continues to fly UA, arguably vindicates UA's decision to close the account, as it would seem inconceivable to them that someone so wronged would go back to UA. It's like a bank closing one's account with 10,000 USD for alleged fraud and freezes your assets and you go back asking to open another account with 0 USD balance - bit odd...