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Generally, I would hope most people would at least make a fair effort to find out who it belonged to. Certainly don't think they should be jailed for it, nor did I suggest these type of airline customers should be punished (criminally or otherwise).

This is predominantly the airline's fault and most blame should be placed on them. At least in this case some good came out of it - the food shelter received some (relatively) free pudding. In the case of the new trend in generating miles (manufactured spending for credit cards) there's an externality that impacts people who don't even travel. Credit card companies are required to determine which persons are using the cards solely to generate points for airline miles, to remove them from the programs and potentially cancel their cards. Drug and grovery stores are now required to have their workers fill out federal money laundering forms on these individuals who purchase large amounts of vanilla reloads or conduct suspicious money transfers. The costs of documenting and preventing these abuses are passed on to the end customers, whether or not they even care about airlines miles or even fly. If you use any major credit card company, you're subsidizing these operations.

If the manufactured spenders put 10% of the effort into productive work that they did into gaming credit card rewards systems, we (and they) would be a lot better off for it. Do they deserve to be punished for it, though? No. Still silly and thoughtless.




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