Airline loyalty programs are important customer engagement tools, offering members valuable rewards like flights, upgrades, and exclusive services. Yet, their increasing value has rendered them attractive targets for fraud. Cybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities in loyalty programs, perpetrating account takeovers, unauthorized point redemptions, and synthetic identity fraud using cutting-edge technologies.
Fraudsters follow the money, and loyalty ecosystems are now big business. According to the Global Fraud Trends 2024 report from London-based fraud prevention company Ravelin, fraud increased for 75.7% of travel-sector merchants in the past year.
In addition to fostering customer retention, airline loyalty programs have become big revenue streams. In 2023, Roughly 57% of all points or miles were issued through co-branded credit card spend, creating approximately $25 billion in economic activity, according to Business Insider.
Despite their financial importance and the inclusion of valuable personal information, these programs often employ weaker security protocols compared to banking apps. Consequently, instances of account takeovers (ATOs) have surged, jeopardizing substantial financial rewards and eroding customer trust.
Airlines feel that surge acutely because point balances behave like cash: a successful attack can drain thousands of dollars worth of seats or upgrades.
Two factors fuel the success rate of attacks:
- Legacy security gaps – Many frequent-flyer portals still rely on passwords or static security questions.
- Readily available credentials – Billions of leaked email-and-password pairs make credential-stuffing cheap and fast.
To protect loyalty programs while maintaining customer convenience, airlines need adaptable security technology.
How modern attacks work—and how orchestration stops them
As the value of loyalty programs increases, they become increasingly susceptible to sophisticated fraud schemes leveraging bots and stolen personal information. Here are key threats airlines face and how orchestrated identity verification & risk analysis mitigate them:
| Attack Type | How it plays out | Orchestration-led defense |
| Credential-stuffing ATOs | Bots test thousands of email / password combos and scrape successful logins. | Unified risk engine spots velocity anomalies, new-device logins and bot signatures, then triggers step-up checks (e.g., phishing-resistant MFA). |
| Phishing & fake brand sites | Victims enter credentials on convincing look-alike pages; attackers replay them at scale. | Device and network reputation signals flag logins coming from known phishing infrastructure; orchestration can automatically step this traffic up to require document or document-free identity verification, neutralizing stolen passwords. |
| Call-center social engineering | Fraudster convinces agent to move points or reset credentials. | FastTap workflow ensures caller must prove possession of the member’s registered phone before any high-risk action; just-in-time step ups can require low-friction verification ahead of permitting transactions. |
Additionally, an orchestration-based approach offers these advantages:
- 360° signal aggregation
Bring device intelligence, mobile-network data, behavioral analytics, threat feeds and government watch-lists into one control plane. A composite risk score is far harder to spoof than any single factor.
- Adaptive, just-in-time authentication
Instead of forcing every user through high-friction steps, trigger stronger proof only when risk spikes—new geography, large redemption, or agent-assisted transaction. Completion rates stay high while fraud risk plummets.
- Developer-friendly policy adjustments
Low-code orchestration lets security teams test new vendors—device reputation, biometric MFA, sanctions checks—in weeks, not the 12-month procurement cycles typical of legacy IAM.
The Secure Path Forward
Fraud costs can quickly outpace the profits loyalty programs generate. One industry survey found 46% of all fraudulent transactions in travel now involve airline reward programs.
Identity verification—anchored by low-friction checks like ID Dataweb’s MobileMatch—offers a sustainable defense.
MobileMatch is a document-free, mobile-based identity verification service that has recently undergone a major international expansion. MobileMatch uses mobile carrier data and phishing-resistant MFA challenges to confirm users’ identities by verifying possession of their device and association with their phone number.
This approach means that instead of relying on physical ID documents or lengthy security Q&As, loyalty program members can be verified through the mobile phones they already carry.
MobileMatch’s international expansion is poised to bolster loyalty fraud defenses–especially against the rampant account takeover (ATO) attempts and social engineering attacks that target airline loyalty accounts. When a frequent-flyer account login or call center request triggers a MobileMatch verification, the user must prove they have the legitimate phone in hand. This simple step directly thwarts many ATO schemes.
The expanded country coverage dramatically enhances ID verification capabilities for airlines and loyalty programs with international customer bases – they can now apply the same high-assurance verification across more regions without gaps.
In practice, a long-time loyalty member logging in from their usual device might sail through without interruption, whereas a risky login (new device, strange location) triggers MobileMatch to step in with an extra verification.
This balance keeps user experience smooth for genuine customers while maintaining high assurance. The end result is ATO prevention that doesn’t punish the honest traveler.
