Why your airline miles are easy theft targets
By: Jennifer Waters, Wall Street Journal: Market Watch
In the latest scam on consumers, cyber crooks are using emails and other tactics to phish for your airline miles, using them on hotels, cars and merchandise.
“When people have hundreds of thousands of miles, that’s like having money in the bank,” said George Hobica, founder of AirFareWatchdog.com, a travel site. “Consumers need to treat these accounts like they would their bank accounts or any other important account,” he said.
Many times consumers don’t even know they’ve been bilked out of their miles until they try to redeem them. This spring a Chicago couple discovered that the 175,000 miles they thought they had in their United Airlines account had been stripped down to 12,000. The airlines told them that the miles had been used for a trip to Singapore — which the couple had not taken.
