Update 4/23/20: It looks like this situation is more complex than first thought. An important clarification is that no changes to receipts were being made for example. Dans Deals has more on this you can read here.
Original post: According to American Airlines insider @xJonNYC American Airlines has shut down some frequent flyer accounts for submitting bogus car rental receipts. The reason that people were submitting these bogus receipts is that American Airline miles expire after 18 months of no activity, but if you rented a car within that period that wasn’t credited properly it’s possible to get those miles reinstated by providing a receipt. Obviously some people were making changes to their receipts to get their miles reactivated and now American Airlines is shutting down accounts because of it.
This sounds like much more legitimate shut downs than the previous credit card abuse shut downs, but it still strikes me as strange timing on American Airlines behalf. Although given that baggage fees on transatlantic flights were increased yesterday it’s not that surprising.
While I don’t have an issue with this specific crackdown, at what point is AA squeezing blood out of a turnip?
Are there really that many people submitting bogus receipts for car rentals? Expired miles are kind of gravy for these programs anyway as well… is there really that much cash at stake? I would think AA has far more urgent/important issues on hand right now than going after the (maybe 100?) people that did this.
I get the feeling that the AA fraud department does this for sport.
If people can’t write down an expiration date reminder and then make a small dining or shopping portal purchase ahead of time to extend the date they deserve to lose their miles.
Soon enough AA will join United, Delta, Southwest and JetBlue and eliminate mileage expirations. In the meantime, I keep $12 in my Bask account to get 1 mile automatically deposited into my AA account each month.
Isn’t it easier to just buy something through a portal then to try to pull off fraud? These people are getting what they deserve.
Not condoning or condemning what they did here but the difference here vs a portal was you could do this retroactively. This was a way to restore points after they expired which I don’t believe you could do with a portal. That said I pay for Award Wallet premium and watch my expiration dates so never had to do anything like this.
For people who say, how hard can it be to do a periodic transaction to keep miles alive? Well, the answer of course is not hard at all. But sometimes there are other factors and situations involved, so I am going to take a contrarian tack here, one which I am sure will cause the mass heaping of opprobrium on me lol.
Full disclosure, I am one of the people who used this technique last year, once and once only. My father had recently passed away, and as an avid AA traveler he had an AA account that he had managed for many, many years. When he passed it took me some time to get through the grief process, and when I came out of it and started dealing with the estate I realized his miles had all expired in the meantime. It may sound silly, but the loss of the miles in-and-of-themselves did not bother me as my family and I have enough for us for years to come, but it did feel at the time like I was losing a small part of my father again. Thus I wanted to reinstate them, and I availed myself of this technique. Was it wrong? Seemingly so. Would i do it again? No. But my point in all of this is to just point out that the easy-out of asking why can’t someone just buy miles / do a transaction does not always paint a full picture
Hmmm…. My father recently passed away, too, but I would not have done that.
What? You can send uncredited receipts directly to AA? For the longest time now airlines have been instructing people to contact the car rental company for missing credit.
Does anyone have any updates on the AA purge related to mailers?
Is the purge ongoing? I.E. Are there still new closure reports coming in? It’s impossible to gather info on the situation since the Reddit thread was locked.
What was the specific threshold that AA set? I saw some people mention 3 cards in 24 months was the threshold…whereas others said 4 cards in 24 months…those were the two most common things I saw mentioned but there were other theories as well…was there ever any clarity here?
Shutdowns appeared to have stopped at the very end of February…before COVID started to take off.
Thanks, what’s the source of your info? (not trying to be a dick, genuinely curious)
Source is probably the private reddit forum. Early/mid-March, the bloodletting does seem to have stopped. No clear rationale. No firmly established limits. Who the hell knows. Only Toby.
Where can I submit (legitimate) car rental receipts to AA?
Do you want corpsec eyes on your account?
If not, those few miles probably aren’t worth it even though they’re legitimate.
These people submitting bogus receipts are stupid. You can just make a small purchase using American Airlines’ shopping portal to keep your miles alive.
Yeah, I don’t understand this either — which makes me think there’s MORE going on here than just extending “mileage expiration” (which wouldn’t be a common issue for gamers anyway) I assume this was also an effort to “earn” miles from the fraudulent rentals. Right?
I agree. I think the problem was, that the miles were already expired and they hadn’t realized it before, so doing a small transaction like that wouldn’t have helped at that point. The only way was to credit a transaction from BEFORE the expiry date, and this was the only way to do it.
Of course, it’s possible to always stay on top of your miles before they expire, surely that could have avoided it. I’m just explaining why someone would have done this after the fact, instead of the easier ways. They had no other choice and nothing to lose at that point, the miles were gone anyways.
It’s not like they don’t warn you your miles are set to expire. I got an email from AA before my miles were due to expire, so I made a small purchase with my Aviator card.
Seems like pretty clear fraud was committed by those customers.
Given that the miles would have been expired without the fraudulent receipt, closing the account seems legitimate.