NAB Frequent Flyers Loop Hole

spineiro on 13/06/2013 - 09:55
Last edited 13/06/2013 - 10:02 by 1 other user

Article copied below for those that can't access the link due to the new subscription policies.
http://www.news.com.au/travel/news/nab-shuts-down-qantas-fre…

Is this person on here?

MAN reaps 380,000 frequent flyer points for just $70. But if you're thinking about doing it too, you can't. NAB has shut down the loophole.

In January, the National Australia Bank offered 100 additional frequent flyer points for each purchase made on an NAB Qantas credit card. The problem was it didn't say how much you had to spend on each purchase.

According to BRW, Anthony Agius spotted the loophole and jumped on it. He made 7000 purchases of one cent each, mostly to CityLink - Melbourne's toll road operator.

"CityLink did call me, but they were mainly concerned with the fact my credit card may have been stolen, or that their billing system went crazy," Agius told BRW. "Once I told them I was doing it on purpose to get points, they were relieved and didn't say anything after that."

NAB was not happy. On January 15 it wrote to Mr Agius saying it would not honour any one cent transactions he made between January 6 and 9.

"It was NAB's intention that 'eligible purchases' would be the usual everyday purchases however there was no minimum spend noted in the letter of offer and I'm sorry if this has caused any misunderstanding," the bank's case manager wrote.

Still Mr Agius gets to keep the points that he did manage to obtain before NAB noticed.
"I have used some of the points for a few domestic trips, but plan to book two business class round-the-world tickets eventually," he told BRW.

Mod: The original OzBargain thread about it

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• 

  gimme on 13/06/2013 - 09:56

  LOL, sure he's an Ozbargainer!! and if so why didn't he tell us.

• 

  neil on 13/06/2013 - 10:01

  +3

  He did. There's a whole thread about it. For some reason the Herald Sun/BRW are 6 months behind the times.

• 

  MITM on 13/06/2013 - 10:34

  +1

  Here's my favourite:

  1 Buy 12,150 serves of pudding

  "Pudding guy", A.K.A civil engineer David Phillips, is a local hero in American point-chasing circles.

  Philips earned a massive 1,253,000 frequent flyer miles by buying 12,150 servings of packaged chocolate pudding. And while the pudding purchases cost him only US$3,037.30 his million-mile haul was the equivalent of 21 return tickets from the US to Australia.

  The eagle-eyed engineer, who also teaches at University of California, was shopping in a supermarket when he noticed a promotional deal on "Healthy Choice" products: 500 free miles for every 10 products purchased plus another 500 points if the products were purchased and claimed within that month.

  The first product he spotted was a TV meal costing US$2. Further down the aisle, he saw a Healthy Choice can of soup for 90c. Philips quickly did the maths and realised that 500 points at 0.9c each was a very cheap way to accrue points, so he filled his trolley with soup.

  Philips headed to a nearby super-store to buy more soup, but discovered something that set his mathematical brain into overdrive: small plastic tubs of individual-serve Healthy Choice chocolate pudding were on sale as part of the flyer miles promotion for just 25c each.

  This meant that each individual frequent flyer point had an effective cost of just 0.0025c, because he could buy 10 tubs at 25c each to claim 1,000 free miles.

  Phillips bought out the whole store's supply of chocolate puddings, visited three more grocery stores in the area and cleared out their shelves as well. He also had a store manager order him three palettes, or 60 more cases, of the individual serve puddings.

  Having stockpiled 12,150 serves of chocolate pudding, Philips then realised he wouldn't have enough time to peel off all the labels and fill in the redemption forms before the 'bonus 500 points' deadline expired. So he enlisted the help of local Salvation Army staff to peel off the labels and fill in the forms in exchange for the donation of the chocolate pudding tubs for people in need in the area.

  And because this was a donation, Philips was also able to claim a tax deduction on The Great Pudding Purchase, which put $825 back into his pocket via his next tax refund.

  Healthy Choice initially baulked at making good on their points promotion, claimed it hadn't received Philips' redemption forms. But after showing them proof of registered delivery, they honored the promotion, and he started receiving thick wads of vouchers in the mail, able to be redeemed with his choice of airline for points.

  He deposited 1,037,000 of the points into his American Airlines account and split the rest — 216,000 points — across United, Delta and Northwest airlines.

• 

  MITM on 13/06/2013 - 10:36

  +1

  And best Australian effort:-

  2 Bet the house

  One Australian flyer uncovered a clever way to earn points through gambling, with very low risk bets.

  Writing under the name "Abeyant" on the Australian Frequent Flyer forum, he reported that some credit cards don't treat gambling purchases as cash advances, which do not earn points, but instead as actual purchases – which count towards points and also quality for the interest-free period on most cards.

  He used a NAB Platinum Visa with a credit limit of $30,000 to buy $30,000 dollars of credit in a CentreBet account. He then redrew on his home loan to pay off his credit card and dump more money into CentreBet, until his account balance was up to around $200,000 (at which point he'd maxed out his home loan.)

  Then it was just a matter of finding extremely low-risk bets to place the money on – bets which were basically 'even money'.

  "The night before the (2010 Federal) election I put the $200,000 on ALP (Julia Gillard) to retain the federal seat of Lalor paying $1.01 for every $1 bet."

  Julia Gillard retained her local seat, so this safe bet delivered 132,000 Qantas Frequent Flyer points (along with an additional $2,000 in winnings), allowing Abeyant to withdraw his funds from CentreBet and pay off his home loan again!

  "I've done this over a number of elections; both state, federal and US Presidential. US election betting basically goes on whether the Democrats or Republicans will win a particular state" Abeyant explains. "So far I've amassed close to 550,000 points in just over 2 years just from this particular strategy."

  However, while Abeyant admits that although there is "basically no risk", his strategy of betting on leaders with strong electoral margins wouldn't have worked if he'd put his money on John Howard during the 2007 Federal election.

  UPDATE 12 May 2011: a reader advises us that NAB is changing its credit card rules from 1 July 2011 to prevent gambling usage from accruing frequent flyer points.

  • 

    neil on 13/06/2013 - 12:12

    Weird. The Age has just paraphrased the story above in a just published article. What's going on with the Herald Sun/The Age. Recycling a 6 month old story, copied from a magazine, copied from the Internet.

    • 

      MITM on 13/06/2013 - 14:11

      Perhaps The Age sources from OzBargain now - or syncronicity

• 

  MITM on 13/06/2013 - 10:44

  And then there's the story of the unemployed american, sitting at home watching wheel of fortune for months on end - when he noticed the wheel followed a sequence.
  He went on to the show and predicted where the wheel would stop next and cleaned up all the prizes.

  Can't find the article, sorry.

  Another one - albeit rather small scale… I noticed after returning a TV to Dick Smith and getting a refund onto my credit card that while the points earnt for using the card disappeared, the Everyday Rewards Points stayed in my QFF account… Which was around 2,000 points that I got for buying and returning a TV… Haven't actually tried doing it again, so not sure if anything has changed since then…

• 

  Almost Banned on 13/06/2013 - 11:05

  I suspect you mean Press Your Luck MITM…
  No Whammies!
  http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Press_Your_Luc…

  • 

    MITM on 13/06/2013 - 14:12

    I always thought it was an urban myth - but there it is on the internet - so must be true.

• 

  ComfortablyNumb on 13/06/2013 - 12:40

  This is so good, loving these stories,

  The pudding tale was awesome!

  Should go down in OzBargain "folk lore" along with other epic bargain feats! (Perhaps a new topic lol)

• 

  MITM on 13/06/2013 - 14:15

  Anthony Agius (AKA Decryption ?) should be OB'er of the year.