I travel for work, and have accrued about $12k worth of airlines points. I don’t really want to use them for personal travel, as I travel too much as is.
Would it be possible to:
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Book a flight.
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Get a receipt for the booking.
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Cancel the flight within 24 hours for a full refund back to my card.
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Book the same flight using points.
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Use the receipt in my expenses to get reimbursed for cash.
Or is there something I’m missing? Do they have any contact with the airline to confirm the receipt is legit?
I almost don’t even consider this unethical, as the company is paying the same as they would if I didn’t use my points.
You might get away with it unless somebody looked. How big is the company you work for?
I would consider it mid-sized. Internal accounting department, not outsourced.
Would the size matter? So bigger companies reconcile every receipt with the company that provided the receipt?
It depends.
Sometimes bigger companies have more room to hide. They don’t care.
Sometimes bigger companies can afford to hire people to be inquisitive.
A big company that seems not to laying people off is probably not paying attention. Then you could consider trying. I wouldn’t try until I was prepared to be caught and fired.
This is your own personal card but your employer reimburses back travel funds for you once you’ve got a receipt?
I’d check for alternative redemption options on the card first. ‘Cover my purchase’ or similar. Maybe you could use it for online shopping until it eventually runs out.
You could also buy gift cards and sell them online, but that’s a lot more work.
Using your own company as the conversion from points to cash is risky because that’s also your main form of income.
Really it depends on how your employer handles expenses for travel, and how lax they are about verifying receipts.
Several places where I’ve worked have had things in place that would stop this kind of thing from occurring (whether that was the intended purpose behind those things or not)
But if they only require you submit the purchase receipt, then you might be able to do what you suggest. But if there’s any info on the receipt that could lead them back to the canceled ticket (confirmation number, etc) then it could backfire on you if they check it. They could probably even use the credit card transaction number to the same end. But I’d expect that to be more involved and less likely unless you did something to make them suspicious.
Possible? Maybe. Risky? Also maybe.
Fair enough. Probably not worth risking my job over then. I didn’t know if it was possible to verify receipts like that. But if it’s a possibility, then nah.
When you redeem these rewards miles, does it have to be for you, personally, or can you use them to buy tickets for someone else?
If you can use them for others, then a simpler way to exchange them for cash might be to just offer it on some online marketplace that in exchange for cash, you’ll get airline tickets for them. You get cash, they get their flight at a discounted rate.
Basically no, this would not work.
That kinda stuff might have worked 20 years ago, when ‘points rewards’ were a fairly new concept and banks had not fully thought through potential ways to game the system, as you’ve described…
But they’ve now had about 20 years of ‘clever’ people functionally finding all the flaws, and they’ve since fixed them.
For starters, if you book a flight and then cancel it 24 hrs later, there is no actual guarantee you’d get a full refund.
Beyond that, if the payment was reversed or cancelled, so too would the rewards points be undone.
If you’re going to try to get a cash refund… for a credit card txn that was cancelled…
That’s basically fraud, you’ll go to jail.
Unethical or not, this is stupid, unless you want to be investigated for fraud.
If you want the specifics, go find the exact, precise terms of the agreement you signed when you got the credit card with rewards points.
Chances are high that there is a lot of language that explicitly states that trying to convert points into direct cash is either not allowed, or follows a framework laid out in great detail, where the bank controls exactly what you can and cannot do with the points.
I think you’re misunderstanding what they’re asking. It’s not about scamming the airline or the bank that issued the credit card. It’s about scamming their employer.
I think you might have misunderstood what they are trying to do.
My understanding is that they are trying to convert their airline points into cash via reimbursement by their company/employer (not their credit card company).
Based on my understanding, this ULPT makes sense. Not the same thing, but I used to ask my company to book things myself so I’d get the free 2-3% back on my credit card.
