Two American Airlines flyers have sued the air carrier, accusing it of stealing more than 1 million in collective reward miles from them after they opened up multiple credit cards that offered sign-up bonus miles.
In the lawsuit filed on Monday in US District Court for the Northern District of California, Ari and Shanna Nachison accuse American Airlines of abruptly closing their accounts with the airline's frequent-flier program, AAdvantage, in 2020, forcing them to forfeit about 564,463 and 550,664 award miles, respectively.
The lawsuit alleges that American Airlines accused the California residents of fraud for opening several AAdvantage credit card accounts through Citibank and Barclays between 2017 and 2019, even though there were no bonus restrictions to do so. The Nachisons say in the lawsuit they did not engage in fraud when they applied for and opened those credit card accounts.
American Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider on Tuesday.
The lawsuit was filed as a proposed class action. If it's allowed to move forward as a class-action lawsuit, other American Airlines customers who feel they were similarly harmed may have the opportunity to join as plaintiffs.
According to the lawsuit, the Nachison's were each awarded tens of thousands of enrollment bonus miles to their AAdvantage accounts after meeting the sign-up bonus requirements for the Citibank-AAdvantage and Barclays-AAdvantage credit cards.
The lawsuit says American Airlines claimed the customers "engaged in fraud in order to seize on an opportunity to terminate their accounts, delete hundreds of thousands of bonus miles (which held monetary value), and canceled upcoming tickets and bookings."
The airline "seized all bonus miles, regardless of how they were accrued, including those miles for which AA does not even allege were earned through fraud," says the suit.
The lawsuit says Ari and Shanna Nachison received separate emails in 2020 from American Airlines informing them that their AAdvantage accounts were closed due to alleged "violations of the General AAdvantage Program Conditions."
The emails said that those violations "related to the accrual of ineligible miles and benefits; through fraud, misrepresentation and/or abuse of the AAdvantage Program," according to the lawsuit.
"The generic emails informing Plaintiffs and Class Members that their accounts were terminated never mentioned Citi, Barclays, or the Citi-AAdvantage credit cards or Barclays-AAdvantage credit cards at issue," the lawsuit says.
Instead, the lawsuit says, the emails only contained "boilerplate language."
American Airlines' "decision to conceal all specificity regarding the alleged fraud was an intentional attempt to delay and prevent Plaintiffs and Class Member from pursuing their legal rights," states the lawsuit.
When the Nachinsons received the emails about the termination of their AAdvantage accounts they did not know they themselves were being accused of fraud, according to the lawsuit.
"AA's decision to terminate AAdvantage accounts entirely was improper and denied AAdvantage members the benefits they had accrued through previous purchases," the suit says.
