A New Wave Of American Airlines Locked Accounts, With A Happy Ending This Time

by Gary Leff

Apparently over the past several days American Airlines ‘locked’ a number of AAdvantage accounts. This was unrelated to the recent spate of accounts that were shut down after members used ‘codes’ to earn multiple new credit card bonuses in a short period of time.

American locked these accounts without communicating with members, leading to much confusion and consternation – what have I done that could have triggered this? – such as some use of back-to-back and throwaway tickets.

However the truth is much more mundane, it appears, these account shutdowns were based on a belief that they could be the victim of hacking as JonNYC reports.

Those shutdowns in recent months related to what American considered to be gaming Citibank initial bonus offers (opening new accounts for the purpose of getting sent codes which didn’t have restrictions on getting a bonus based on having already gotten one recently) didn’t permit accounts to be re-opened.

That’s very different from how things usually work when your account gets audited. In most cases, the following advice applies:

In this case, accounts that were suspected to have been hacked are being replaced by brand new accounts with miles transferred – though apparently the transfer of elite status, systemwide upgrades, and the like is not instantaneous. The underlying cause here may be the recent Marriott ‘second’ data breach and members using the same login details for both American and for Marriott.

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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Comments

  1. They shut down take away miles if they think you are getting AA card bonuses regularly like every 6 to 12 months. Nothing to do with mailers for most people. The lesson is only apply for AA Disadvantage miles cards every 3 to 4 years the most. They have the bonuses you get.

  2. @Jim Don’t take all the data points you’ve seen on reddit at face value. this was about Citi cards and not about Barclays cards, for MOST people affected this WAS about mailers as the primary means of getting Citi bonuses for personal AA cards every 6-12 months.

  3. I got the axe for business mailers. In my view it was Citi that caused the problem, not AA. Now I’ll likely not fly AA ever again, but as I live at a Delta/SW hub I can ignore them. I came out ahead in the end. While I had Citi AA cards for over 30 years, they were backup to Amex. At the time my account was cancelled I had about 350K AA miles of which about 40K were from pre-mailer days. During the year I accumulated miles, I had one trip in first to Central America and one biz class flight for two from Berlin. AA could have just clawed back the 220K miles I got from mailers rather than go nuclear.

  5. Mailers are an offer to apply for a card received in the mail. They have a 9 or 12 digit code that you enter into the online application. While one was not supposed to receive the sign on bonus miles more often than every two years, some of the mailers did not have language to that effect. Using the code one could apply for a new card 95 days after the previous, and after the required spend on the card you’d get the bonus miles. The mailers came from Citi, not AA. The two year limitation was by Citi, not AA as was the failure to enforce it.

  8. is there a way to unlock the account. I can see unlok account or password reset anywhere or is that happening to me only. If they do;t set this right I am sure people are going elsewhere. I went to united for the next booking. So long American

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