Where are your Air Miles Going?

May 19th, 2009

You Gonna Use those Air Miles?

The LCBO evidently has fired 10 employees for allegedly de-frauding the Air Miles system (according to the CBC). This one while upsetting, is not surprising.

More than once I have thought (while standing in line behind someone at a store that takes Air Miles or some other rewards program where your number is put in at the end end of sale) about asking whether their sale could go onto my account. The problem with this idea is it is fraudulent in the eyes of the rewards program, since I didn’t purchase the goods, and evidently this is sort of what these employees were doing (taking points on sales where the consumer didn’t have their card, or didn’t care).

This is another example of the problem of “insider trading” (i.e. employees or insiders taking advantage of the system, which we have seen in the lottery sales area, and now with this reward system). The LCBO policy quoted is:

“Staff are … prohibited from using the purchase by any customer to issue reward miles to their own personal account or the account of other staff, family, friends, other customers or any other person,”

How can this be remedied? Not sure, but it is something to be prudent about, to make sure you don’t lose any rewards you should get. In this instance no one lost their points, it was a situation where fraudulent points were created where none should have been given out, not to rationalize or worse condone this bad behavior, but the victims were the folks at the Air Miles reward program.

Federal Language Test Leaked?

On Thursday I took two Federal Government language tests (for French), and they were quite challenging (I was close to being able to work in a French environment in my younger days, my French now is very rusty). I found out Friday morning that evidently these tests may have been leaked (according to the Ottawa Citizen), which is intriguing, and may prove very costly to the Federal Government (which will have to retest a large group of folks who have been tested (hopefully not me)).

The tests leaked were the two which I took, and they were done on line, on a private network, so how the questions were “copied” seems to suggest another “insider job”, but we shall see.