How an engineer earned 1.25 million airline miles for free

Hi- I ran across this on one of the couponing forums that I visit, and thought people here might be interested in this. An engineer that teaches at UC Davis, heard about a rebate that Healthy Choice was running, where if you purchased their product and sent in the UPC code, you got free airline miles. Even though the rebate was for frozen entrees, he was somehow able to purchase $3000 worth of healthy choice pudding, and remove the UPC stickers, and get airline miles from them. They had an earlybird deadline, where if you sent in the rebates by a certain date, you could get double the amount of airline miles. Like I said, he spent $3,000 on pudding, and to not arouse suspicion, he said the pudding was being purchased for Y2K, since this was 1999 when he purchased the pudding. He then had his wife take the stickers off the packages so he could mail them in. When he realized that the wife would never get the stickers removed in time, he came with a plan, and decided to donate the rest of the pudding to the Salvation Army, on the condition that they remove the stickers, and return them to him. He was then able to make an $800 deduction on his income tax for a charitable donation. When he mailed in the rebates he got 150,00 miles back, he was somehow able to turn this into 1.25 million miles. I assume he got more free miles when he started redeeming his free ones. He joined the frequent mileage club too for what ever airline he had the miles for, and that helped him acquire more free miles. He has never had to pay for an airplane ticket since then. Here is the link to the story.

http://gizmodo.com/how-an-engineer-earn ... 1339646546

I don't know if I would go through all the trouble he did to get the miles.

Enjoy the article

Most important part of this story is that it lead to the making of one of my all time favorite movies, Punch Drunk Love.

Since 1999, companies have gotten a lot smarter and set reasonable limits on the rewards that could be earned in a promotion.

The 1990s were a great time for earning and using miles. I could earn a domestic RT ticket every two weeks on America West Airlines just flying between St. Louis and Yuma.