Yes it’s not technically a scam because it’s legal.

But it has scam smells: layering, misdirection, lock-in, very fine print, gamification, adjacent complex social media apparatuses.

I’d place it near MLMs, loot boxes, timeshares, robux, liquidity mining.

Yeah, flying my family of 5 to Hawaii using skymiles accrued on my Amex. Totally a scam.

They’re basically interchangeable with cash. I don’t get the issue. The main frustration I have is that I cant buy myself a ticket with cash and then pay skymiles for my child. If they weren’t of an age that they must be on the same reservation it wouldn’t matter. Feels more like a limitation of Delta’s abacus that sits behind their mobile app.

It’s not nearly as complicated as you make it out to be, and the literal point of what I posted is to try and simplify it.

An MLM or timeshare it is not.

Yes, it has gotten harder than it was a decade ago. But it is far from a “scam”