Over 39,000 Miles disappeared from FC account!

Hi everybody,
hopefully somebody else who has been in a similar situation can help.

I track my mileage using Award Wallet and was fairly surprised to see on Monday that over 11,000 miles had been deducted from my FC account.

I called today to see what the cause might be and was told that it was impossible for miles to disappear from my account. The FC representative told me that this cannot happen without some kind of tracer being left on the account.

After the call, I checked my account again (logging in directly to FC) and can see that another 28,000 miles have disappeared as well!

There are no lines on my 6 month statement showing these deductions.

The worst part is, G space just opened up on a flight I'd been monitoring for ages, just as my balance has now dropped below 50k Miles !


If anybody else has experienced anything similar, I'd really appreciate your help. I've emailed customer services but imagine that recovering the miles won't be a straightforward process.

Nope can thankfully say I have never seen this happen. ?|

The agent is correct the balance would have to have entries that take out the miles in question or the running balance would be wildly inaccurate.

Are you sure that the problem is not with the sync in Award Wallet in the first place? - Could it have thought you had more miles than you did and subsequently corrected the total upon a sync with FC?

Only other thing I could think of is that an earlier transaction(s) totalling 39000 (odd, exact number ) miles were removed... again this would leave some trace, but you could always go back further than 6 months to have a look and do some totting up yourself.

Unfortunately, unless you can show FC where the miles have been taken out (where they were definitely due) it will be a case, in their eyes, of a customer phoning up claiming that some third party app told him he was due 39000 miles more than he actually has... sorry for being direct but that is how they will see it.

Sorry if my post didn't correctly explain.
I'm in a bit of a panic. As you can probably imagine.

Although I use award wallet to track all of my balances.
I have been clicking through to FC to check award availability on almost a daily basis.

The balances were never out of sync.

It was seeing the drop in award wallet that alerted me and led to me immediately checking FC on Monday morning.

The drop isn't a round 39,000 but is in that region.
I gave customer services the exact number.


There is no question that the miles have been deducted directly from my FC account. I saw the exact balance on Friday and it hadn't changed for a while. I know how many miles I had as it was enough for my reward flight. Not something you easily mistake!


My largest concern is the fact that the FC helpline are unable to go back and see a snapshot of my balance on a previous date. Imagine if a bank said the same thing to you about showing historical balances on your account!

Given the monetary value of FC miles, I don't think Virgin should be taking this kind of thing lightly. It effectively invalidates the entire idea of collecting FC miles,if they can just disappear without a trace.

Have you looked at your balance say for the last 5 years or at least back to the date when you started to build up your miles.

I know there is a way to look at it from the Manage My Account page and it's changing it within the website address ... our technically minded V-Flyers will explain that bit better.

You *may* be able to see something that way??

My largest concern is the fact that the FC helpline are unable to go back and see a snapshot of my balance on a previous date. Imagine if a bank said the same thing to you about showing historical balances on your account!

Cheers for clarifying the missing pieces of the puzzle.

Banks.. trying to appropriate your money.. never

Are you suggesting that VS should be trusted with the kind of server capacity that a bank use? :0 :0 Ha ha ha, can you imagine B)

I can understand your concerns, but as the agent said it would be near impossible for the balance to change without there being an entry on the system giving a narrative as to why. It could be something that was outstanding prior to the 6 months that you have looked at, only way for you to tell is have a look at the year or if no luck a complete history, to find the exact number you are missing. I am sure that FC can look into this for you if you get into tech trouble.

This rings a bell. Didn't someone else post about this earlier this year?

weird - I would suggest the following.

Get a statement of your full history of the FC account.

Then "do the math" - go through and tot up the incomings and outgoings (you may be able to get the data into a spreadsheet to make this easier). I don't know how long ago you started collecting miles, and how many entries you have, but you need to do this to prove the balance you are being shown is incorrect.

If you can do that, take screen shots etc, you'll have some "evidence" to show FC people and they'll need to take you more seriously.

The way you see extended statements is:

Log into flying club.

Go to the address bar and where you see
...statementSelection=1...
Change the 1 to, say 20 so it reads
...statementSelection=20...

In my case, this brings up my full history back to March 2008.

You may need to use higher/lower number to get your full history.

Hope this helps and good luck.

Hi

Check your emails, I regularly get emails from the flying club and on most it gives my balance at the time the email was sent.

Just a suggestion.

Trev

Good one - yes, an email at a certain date, then if there are no transactions beyond that in the FC statement - get out of that one...

Hi

Check your emails, I regularly get emails from the flying club and on most it gives my balance at the time the email was sent.

Just a suggestion.

Trev

I was going to suggest that - as you would be able to say that on X date you had Y miles so the disappearances must have happened after that date.

Also agree with the getting your full FC history using the change in your browser and downloading that into excel and then adding the miles up from that. You might also be able to see if there are any deductions and if so what for and when.

Thanks for all of your help guys. Much appreciated!

I went back and checked line by line and the numbers add up to the new total.

However, I have an email from flying club, sent today. It has the (much higher) total that I remembered seeing before.

So it looks like, it is in fact possible, for miles to disappear without a trace :0

I will, of course, keep you all updated. y)

Hi Jermyn,

On checking my husbands account the same thing has occurred, on calculating back I can see what has happened. In June they posted too many miles from the flight we took then twice. It has obviously stayed on there till now, maybe its an end of quarter audit or something, so they have taken them back.

I wonder what would have happened if we had booked another flight with those miles in the time it has taken to rectify. Would they have asked for recompense for them or what? i) Linda

From a slightly different angle, I recently was awarded 40k and then they were taken away a few days later, but the date of removal was backdated over 4 weeks to coincide with the flight I was supposed to be on.

Could it be possible that during an audit, erroneous miles have been found and subsequently removed, but their removal is backdated and the entry shows the backdated date (iyswim) rather than the date they were removed.

My hubbys miles were from the 17th June and that is the date which has been corrected not yesterdays date.

Did you ever get your miles sorted Marshy, have been reading your diary of events. Think I would have gone to Crawley towers, as I would have been sooo mad.Linda

Happened to me as well, I ended up getting birthday miles credited every day for about 7 days on the run up to my birthday, so I knew that they were likely to be removed. Fine, I knew I wasn't really entitled to them - what I find rather dubious here is that way it's done - just eliminating the original entry rather than posting a 'correction debit' as a statement line item, so that you can see what's happened and reconcile your balance to what you may have previously though it was or been told.

The whole point of a statement is that it's there to show all activity - if this happened with your bank statement, you'd damn well expect there to be a clear audit trail of what money went in and out, whether it was erroneous or not...

Surprised really that this is acceptable accounting practise - or perhaps VS have a 'back end' view which does show the original posting and then the removal when there are errors... if so I think that ought to be visible to us as well!

My hubbys miles were from the 17th June and that is the date which has been corrected not yesterdays date.

Did you ever get your miles sorted Marshy, have been reading your diary of events. Think I would have gone to Crawley towers, as I would have been sooo mad.Linda

Sorry OP to hijack your thread but the thought of trying to find mine and remind myself of the fiasco is too much to bear.... :0

Linda, we were given 10K which after much to-ing and fro-wing was upped by 5k. So they gave us 120k, took 120k and reimbursed 45k.

Unfortunately with the 120k they had 'won' us back, we were going to book with them for our next holiday. But after the 'adjustment' I am digging my heels in and we are using up the miles. Going to NYC for a week next month on G's which will leave a balance of about 45K, I may top them up with clubcard vouchers or similar to get them to an amount that could at least give me 2 x G's or a couple of upgrades from PE. But then that's it........I hope. ii)

Hi everybody.

I received an update from Virgin, I've been told that everything looks fine from an accounting perspective.

The email that Flying Club sent me must have been incorrect and Virgin can "only assume" that it didn't count my last award redemption.

This despite the facts:

1. I've never made a redemption for the number of miles which are missing.

2. The miles from my last redemption were taken immediately.

3. I received more than one email since my last redemption, showing its impact on my balance.

So effectively, I've waited a week, only to be told the exact same thing I was told on the Phone. Computer says it's good, so you must be wrong.

I've already gone ahead and booked flights with QF and CX.
These were originally going to be made with VS.

I'm thinking that after I try CX F, UC won't be too much of a draw. Until now, the customer service experience was.

Watch this space...