The airmiles company.
 

http://www.theairmiles.com/

I’ve seen these guys advertising on Facebook offering to sell air miles from various airline programs. Rates are about 25% less than purchasing from the airline and would be useful if you only needed a few thousand miles to top up for a redemption.

However their adverts imply that buying miles to redeem for business and first class tickets is a cheaper option and they give some examples to back up this claim. The problem is the redemption miles they quote for a ticket are at the lowest rate possible and the cash fare used is a normal to higher rate implying a considerable saving. Someone booking far enough ahead to get the lowest redemption rate could probably get a decent deal on a cash fare and some airlines have very limited availability for redemptions on premium routes especially at the lowest mile rate. If using miles at the normal rate there is little if any saving and seats may not be available for redemption at all.

Economy fares are actually more expensive when booked this way and they sell Krisflyer miles for S$0.03 which are only worth S$0.01 when used in partial payment towards a cash fare.

Has anyone managed to make any worthwhile savings using them ?

First off: Where are they getting these 'FFMs' from? As genuine FFMs can only be issued by the carrier, something is wrong.

IF these are genuine FFMs then the carriers are doing back-door sales - which I very much doubt.

IF these are false, any ticket purchased with them will be subject to cancellation without compensation.

There are some websites which offer to purchase FF miles but I understand that some airlines don’t want a secondary market going on and will cancel your membership and any miles you have along with it if they catch you.

Krismiler - I'm pretty sure the airlines take just as dim a view of people buying miles through these sites too. Certainly not a risk I'd take!

i thought airmiles was a trademark name - although now avios

These are miles sold off by people that don't need them or have an excess, and then they're collected and resold. It is of course against the Ts + Cs of the carriers for anyone to either buy or sell miles or any other perk given in loyalty programs and they're not transferable.

It's entirely possible to get away with it, but it's getting far riskier. Most decent airlines employ fraud and revenue protection teams to actively search for this activity, and they'll cancel the ticket and sometimes ban the passenger/s concerned. The fraud detection success rate used to be very low (in one carrier it was less than 20% 3 years ago, now it's over 80% thanks to investment in tools and algorithms which can spot the activity). I'd never risk my ticket on these schemes, I know that much.