Do I Confront The Nigerians Who Stole Our Airline Miles?

Gosh, this is mighty tempting, I just don’t know what the best angle is…

I found the people who stole our Alaska miles!

In August 2024, I wrote about how Ford’s Alaska Mileage Plan account was hacked, and miles were stolen. Specifically, 230,000 miles were taken, and were redeemed for two Qatar Airways business class tickets departing Lagos.

Fortunately airlines are typically pretty good with handling fraud, and I documented our experience dealing with this situation. Long story short, Ford’s miles were reinstated, and his Mileage Plan account is permanently “locked.” When he wants to redeem, he needs to call Alaska and provide a PIN, and then they keep his account unlocked for a few hours so that he can redeem, before locking it again.

For the past several months, we haven’t redeemed any miles out of his account. However, last night, we needed to make a redemption. So he unlocked his account, and then I logged in, only to find something interesting.

Specifically, when going to the page where you enter passenger information, there was a full name and date of birth that was pre-populated, which I hadn’t yet seen. Also, when looking at the Alaska Mileage Plan account activity page, it displayed the full names of the two passengers that the tickets had been booked for (below is that page, with the confirmation numbers and names omitted).

Here’s the thing people might not know about me — I love investigating things, and going down rabbit holes, whatever the topic may be. As an introvert, I could spend hours just researching something (I don’t usually have that kind of time nowadays, but when I do…). That effort is currently being put into something industry related (y’all will find out soon), but I couldn’t help but do a little bit of sleuthing here as well.

It didn’t take that much effort, but I managed to find the social media accounts of these people. At least one of the people is very open about her life, and she seems to be quite the jet set Nigerian. She has lots of great pictures from Doha, and even flying in Qatar Airways business class. She even has birthday posts matching the birthday that was listed in the Mileage Plan profile.

I’m really tempted to confront this traveler

Maybe I’m getting a little too “Trafficked With Mariana van Zeller” on y’all, but I’d really like to get to the bottom of this.

I’m so tempted to confront the traveler, and send her a message on social media. To be clear, I suspect she’s not the actual “thief” who is personally hacking accounts, but instead, I suspect she purchased the ticket from someone who claims to offer cheaper premium tickets.

Now, I don’t know to what extent she’s aware of how the ticket is booked, and/or that this violates the rules. My goal with confronting her is simply to learn more about the black market for tickets booked with stolen miles in Nigeria. This is a major problem across the globe, but it works a bit differently in each country. I’m curious what the system is like in Nigeria.

Is that idea just totally stupid? If it’s not, what’s the best angle for confronting her, though? “Hey, I have your name and date of birth, and a ticket was fraudulently booked out of my account for your travel. I’m not mad, I just want to learn more about how this happened.” Maybe that’s not the best intro.

Or do I create a fake account, complement her jet set lifestyle, and ask if she has any tips for getting deals on business class flights?

Bottom line

While there’s a huge underground network of people buying and selling stolen miles, I’ve never had a situation where information has so directly been revealed to me about who stole miles. I have the names of the two people who booked tickets with stolen miles from Ford’s Alaska Mileage Plan account (and for one traveler, I even have the date of birth).

Of course we didn’t actually lose anything here, since Alaska protects consumers from this kind of fraud. However, with one of the traveler’s having a social media account showing off quite the lifestyle of premium cabin flights, I can’t help but want to learn a little more. I’m not sure she’ll open up, but is it worth a try?

What do you think — should I message this traveler, and if so, how should I go about it, and what should I say?