SkyTeam’s super sleuths help to advance technology and protect members from Frequent Flyer fraud

Loyalty fraud costs program operators more than $1 billion every year and in 2021 the global loyalty management market was valued at US$4,023 million – a figure set to rise to US$13,800 million by 2026.

To keep one step ahead of fraudsters, SkyTeam has developed Retro 2.1, which is currently being trialed by Korean Air and SAUDIA.

Set to be rolled out across all member airlines later this year, Retro 2.1 will crack down on fraud across our members’ FFPs by:

• Flagging up streams of requests from the same IP address across all SkyTeam members – enabling SkyTeam to spot potential ‘bot farms’
• Preventing miles from being transferred into fraudulent accounts by verifying the requester’s date of birth matches the PNR
• Comparing the ticket number given by the requestor to the ticket number in the PNR and determining a match percentage. Any match percentage which falls below the threshold will be automatically flagged as potentially fraudulent.
• Highlighting requests made towards the end of the Retro claim window, which is when fraudsters typically try to claim.

SkyTeam launched the first alliance-wide, real-time retro-credit solution in 2016. This provided customers with a seamless, real-time solution for online retro claims, as well as preventing travelers from claiming miles twice – known as ‘double dipping’.

Before this, retro crediting was a manual process that required customers to send physical copies of their boarding passes to their FPP.

“This original version of Retro provided the most basic features needed, but because internet quality varies around the world, we noticed customers were having to make multiple attempts to request crediting of miles,” said Winston D’Souza, SkyTeam’s Customer Loyalty Senior Manager. “While genuine, only the first transaction was regarded as eligible. Subsequent attempts were therefore flagged as a double dipping, causing a real customer pain point.”

Retro 2.0 was launched in 2019, reducing false double dipping rejections and improving the customer experience by enabling multiple requests from the same customer and same FFP account.

And thanks to the super sleuths who make up SkyTeam’s FFP Fraud Prevention Working Group, our members are benefitting from an added layer of loyalty fraud protection.

Advances in technology has shifted SkyTeam’s focus towards using alliance infrastructure, such as the Loyalty Data Warehouse, to detect suspicious activity before it unfolds.

Fraudsters might be careful to avoid red flags, but our infrastructure enables us to spot them on an alliance-wide scale.

Rather than looking at a one FFP account, SkyTeam can examine all transactions relating to a particular operating flight. This unique visibility into all FFPs allows SkyTeam to track key loyalty metrics and prevent members from having to conduct their own time-consuming searches.