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.

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”

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.