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Re: BE CAREFUL of your rapid rewards points

tlh2o
Explorer C

my points are gone, and I have no idea why, or when. no explanation. not cool southwest, i am one of your biggest cheerleaders. well, I was 😞

Re: BE CAREFUL of your rapid rewards points

DancingDavidE
Aviator A

Did you call customer relations?

https://www.southwest.com/contact-us/contact-us.html?clk=GFOOTER-CUSTOMER-CONTACT-US

 

 

Home airport MDW, frequent visitor to MCO to see the mouse.

Re: BE CAREFUL of your rapid rewards points

sdubow3
Explorer C

My RR account was hacked in September, 2018.  Almost 20,000 miles stolen for travel between Florida and Cuba by people with names I've never known to places I've never been. I only discovered this in January 2019. When I called SW, I was directed to send an email to customer relations where, the phone agent told me, I might get a response as soon as 15 minutes later. On the website where I filled out the email form, however, it said to expect a response within 48 hours. Almost three week later now, I finally got through to customer relations by phone, asked about my seemingly ignored issue, and was told not to expect a response for 30 days. Frustrating. I was planning on using those miles to book award travel for this weekend and now have had to go ahead and book and pay for that flight on another carrier. Now what? The customer relations agent I spoke to today, Brandon, told me that this wasn't a common roblem, but now I see I am not alone. Is SW having some larger security breach that we don't know about? I don't own a SW credit card, I alays book onine where there's a password to my account, and I haven't been told anything about how my account might have been breached. My spidey sense is tingling.... Why would it take so long to investigate something like this. Whoever booked the travel using my miles presumably had to show ID, there are lots of records involved, specific dates, specific locations, etc. Seems like an investigative trail of bread crubs that shouldn't be that hard to check out.

Re: BE CAREFUL of your rapid rewards points

DancingDavidE
Aviator A

@sdubow3 wrote:

Seems like an investigative trail of bread crubs that shouldn't be that hard to check out.


They know exactly who has flown, what they don't know is if there may be arrangements made between individuals where the points were booked on their behalf.

 

The system isn't "breached"  that we know of - the weakness will be your own password, which hopefully you have changed already. If not, change it an select a difficult one to guess, and different from any other sites that you may use.

 

 

 

 

Home airport MDW, frequent visitor to MCO to see the mouse.

Re: BE CAREFUL of your rapid rewards points

dfwskier
Aviator A

@DancingDavidE wrote:

@sdubow3 wrote:

Seems like an investigative trail of bread crubs that shouldn't be that hard to check out.


They know exactly who has flown, what they don't know is if there may be arrangements made between individuals where the points were booked on their behalf.

 

The system isn't "breached"  that we know of - the weakness will be your own password, which hopefully you have changed already. If not, change it an select a difficult one to guess, and different from any other sites that you may use.

 

 

 

 


One piece of advice would be to change your password. A second would be to file a police report.

I've heard that points are worh about 1.8 cents -- so your loss is 20,000 x 1.8 or $360.

 

Someone paid the taxes for the ticket. Southwest should have a credit / debit card number as well as the name on the ticket - which if TSA is doing it'sjob, would have to be correct.

Re: BE CAREFUL of your rapid rewards points

chgoflyer
Aviator A

It's likely a pre-paid credit card was used, which has no tie to any specific person.

 

Also, TSA only checks that a passenger has a ticket in their name for that day -- nothing is checked specific to an individual flight. Meaning, the pass used to clear TSA may not be the boarding pass for the flight. And ID is never checked to board a plane (only if a bag is checked).

 

But what's probably happening in these cases is that hackers are using the points to run a "travel agency," where (possibly) unwitting passengers buy tickets from them (at a discounted rate) that is then booked using the stolen points. The hacker and the passenger(s) are most likely not the same people.

 

This isn't to suggest that discovering the bad guys here is impossible, just that it's complicated. Which is why these investigations do take time.

Re: BE CAREFUL of your rapid rewards points

sdubow3
Explorer C

The first agent I spoke to on the phone actually told me the names associated with the fradulent travel, the dates of the travel, the flight numbers, the departure airport and the arrival airport etc. If you know all that, if they know who sat in the seat on the planes, then I don't see how this so hard to run down. You talk to those people. Either they knowingly participated in this scheme or the didn't. If they didn't and they claim they were duped into buying discount tickets paid for in part by my RR miles, than you ask them where they bought the tickets.  etc.

Re: BE CAREFUL of your rapid rewards points

chgoflyer
Aviator A

@sdubow3 wrote:

The first agent I spoke to on the phone actually told me the names associated with the fradulent travel, the dates of the travel, the flight numbers, the departure airport and the arrival airport etc. If you know all that, if they know who sat in the seat on the planes, then I don't see how this so hard to run down. You talk to those people. Either they knowingly participated in this scheme or the didn't. If they didn't and they claim they were duped into buying discount tickets paid for in part by my RR miles, than you ask them where they bought the tickets.  etc.


 

Again -- the people who actually flew may or may not have been the ones named on the ticket(s). And the passenger information associated with the ticket(s) may or may not be valid.

 

 

Re: BE CAREFUL of your rapid rewards points

dfwskier
Aviator A

@chgoflyer wrote:

@sdubow3 wrote:

The first agent I spoke to on the phone actually told me the names associated with the fradulent travel, the dates of the travel, the flight numbers, the departure airport and the arrival airport etc. If you know all that, if they know who sat in the seat on the planes, then I don't see how this so hard to run down. You talk to those people. Either they knowingly participated in this scheme or the didn't. If they didn't and they claim they were duped into buying discount tickets paid for in part by my RR miles, than you ask them where they bought the tickets.  etc.


 

Again -- the people who actually flew may or may not have been the ones named on the ticket(s). And the passenger information associated with the ticket(s) may or may not be valid.

 

Agree with chgoflyer. There is nothing to prevent an individual from buying a real ticket and using it to clear security. Then cancelling that ticket and using the illicit ticket with a fraudulent name to board the aircraft and take the flight.

 

The only thing that would stop that is TSA doing a gate check (it never does) or Southwest asking to see id at the gate, and it never does. In all of my flights since the advent of TSA (and they number in the hundreds) I've never seen either of the above.

Re: BE CAREFUL of your rapid rewards points

sdubow3
Explorer C

Nerdwallet.com says SW miles may be puschased for roughly $2.7 cents per mile, though they acknowledge they're somewhat cheaper to earn by flying.