50,000 airline miles stolen from a travel expert

If you're anything like me, you've probably spent years , dreaming about the trip you'll eventually take. Maybe it's a business class seat to Europe or that vacation you've been putting off. You keep earning points and watching the balance grow. But what happens when you finally check your account and discover someone else has already spent them?

That's exactly what happened to Katy Nastro, a travel expert with Flighty, a flight-tracking app that provides real-time updates on delays, cancellations and gate changes. During our conversation on The CyberGuy Report podcast, Katy shared how more than 50,000 American Airlines miles vanished from her account. Someone had redeemed them for a flight without her permission.

What surprised me was that Katy knows inside and out. Yet she still found herself dealing with a problem that could happen to anyone with a frequent flyer account. Her experience offers a warning, especially as holiday travel approaches.

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Katy had just landed in New York and was riding home in an Uber. Like many frequent travelers, she opened her American Airlines app to check how many miles she'd earned from her latest trip. Instead, she noticed a substantial drop in her balance. At first, she figured the app had made a mistake. She remembered redeeming about 10,000 miles recently, but the balance was off by roughly 50,000. So she refreshed the app. The missing miles were still missing. That's when she called American Airlines.

The airline told her that someone had redeemed the miles for a ticket in another person's name. Katy had been saving for a trip to Asia. Unfortunately, those miles were now associated with a flight she knew nothing about. "I really had this just stomach drop moment," Katy told me.

She had spent years earning those rewards, including through long flights to Australia. Suddenly, someone else had benefited from all that travel. "I naively never thought this could happen to me because I work in the industry," she admitted. I found that particularly revealing. Katy had previously warned people about loyalty account theft. Even with that experience, she never expected to become a victim herself.

You might assume the airline could simply reverse an unauthorized redemption. After all, the ticket was booked in someone else's name. Unfortunately, Katy discovered that getting her miles back required additional work. American Airlines instructed her to submit a formal fraud complaint by email. She also had to file a police report and provide documentation before the airline would restore her miles. "I had to have the police report filed with them before anything was credited," Katy explained.

She eventually recovered her miles, but the process didn't end there. Katy also had to create a new email address and establish a replacement American Airlines AAdvantage account. Thankfully, the airline transferred her existing status along with her restored rewards. What caught my attention was the police report requirement. Katy had to involve local law enforcement even though the theft happened entirely online. She understood why the airline might want official documentation, but s