How to hack frequent flyer miles for fun and profit

If you really care about frequent flier miles, you end up doing all sorts of crazy things. The simple stuff is buying special credit cards or organizing your flight schedule around high-mileage promotions — but soon you’re using dummy transactions to pump even more miles out of the card or buying an empty seat on a flight just because the miles are worth more than the cash. Once you get a taste for it, you spend an alarming portion of your time concocting more of these schemes, and scouring forums like Flyertalk for tips on any mile-churning tricks you might be missing out on.

This week, the Oxford Internet Institute published a new paper on the internet subculture of mile-churning, and it’s a surprisingly good introduction to the...

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