About This News

According to New Jersey court filings, two people opened business credit cards at a certain bank using other people’s names and harvested a huge number of points. There were 1400 victims and 7000 cards opened in total!

The scheme worked like this:

  • They paid people to obtain real SSNs and personal information
  • They used other people’s SSNs to apply for credit cards and business credit cards, and falsified income information in order to get approved
  • After receiving the cards, they made purchases to meet the spending requirement for the welcome bonus and earned miles and points
  • They sold the miles and points (presumably by selling business-class tickets)
  • They returned the items purchased to earn the welcome bonus, and closed the cards before the annual fee posted (so they did not have to pay)
  • They repeated the above steps for each SSN until it was completely exploited

One especially interesting detail is that 790,000,000 points were drained from this bank, with a value of $8,200,000, which works out to about 1.04c/p.

The case has now reached the grand jury indictment stage. Next will be arraignment, and then trial.

Which Bank Was It?

So here is the question: which bank got completely cleaned out? All you detectives can see whether you can figure it out from the court filings.

  • Clue 1: The headquarters is in or near New York
  • Clue 2: The credit card points can be transferred to airline miles
  • Clue 3: This happened during 2014.8-2016.5
  • Clue 4: The annual fee probably did not post immediately
  • Clue 5: The welcome-bonus points from this bank could be manually pushed to post to the account by calling customer service
  • Clue 6: To transfer points to a frequent-flyer account not belonging to the primary cardholder, that person had to be added as an authorized user
  • Clue 7: After converting these 790,000,000 points into airline miles, the bank had to pay $8,200,000 to the airlines, implying a value of 1.04c/p