Avios transfers between British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus suspended (temporarily?)

One of the major strengths of the airline currency “Avios” is that your points can usually be moved freely between all of the airlines that use Avios for their currency (Aer Lingus, British Airways, Finnair, Iberia, Loganair, and Qatar). The methods you use to combine Avios vary (we have a post about how to do it and a video demonstrating it on Youtube). Unfortunately, British blog Head for Points is reporting that the movement of Avios between British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus has been temporarily suspended. According to Head for Points, this is due to a major rise in theft of Avios from accounts.

You can still move Avios between British Airways and Finnair, Qatar, and Loganair, but not to/from Iberia and Aer Lingus

The current situation only affects transfers between British Airways, Iberia, and Aer Lingus. Transfers to/from other Avios programs remain unaffected.

Head for Points speculates that the issue is a rise in some sort of scam to steal Avios that involves exploiting technological differences in how transfers occur between different Avios programs. Whereas linking your British Airways account with your Qatar / Finnair / Loganair accounts is a one-time permanent link, the movement of Avios from British Airways to Iberia/Aer Lingus apparently relies on a brand new one-time link each time and hackers have found some way to exploit that difference (HfP suggests that this has been on the rise over the past 10 months).

I’m not sure (and neither is Head for Points) how the scam is happening since, as they point out, creating that one-time link to move Avios between British Airways and Iberia / Aer Lingus requires everything on your accounts (including name, birth date, and even email address) to match exactly (even an errant space placed after your name when you created your account, which can sometimes happen when signing up on mobile, can cause an issue). To move points between British Airways and Iberia, your Iberia account must have been opened for at least 90 days and have had some activity in the previous 36 months (you can create that activity by making a transfer from a transferable currency like Amex Membership Rewards points into your Iberia account). Transfers between British Airways and Iberia have long been a pain point rather than something simple, which both means I’d be happy to see a new system for doing so and I’m surprised that it is easy enough to be hacked as to be causing such an issue.

To be clear, the official word from British Airways (as per the screen shot above) is that transfers with Iberia and Aer Lingus are down as they prepare to launch a new transfer system. It is possible that this is a semi-planned outage, but the lack of advance notice combined with the Head for Points report of theft on the rise point to this being a measure taken to cut off the fraudulent transfers while they work out a solution. I could certainly believe that they were already working on implementing a similar technology to the tech they use for transfers with Finnair/Qatar/Loganair, but it probably does take some time to get multiple airlines to adopt new tech.

Unfortunately, I believe that the only way to get points to and from Iberia and Aer Lingus is through British Airways. For the time being, Avios at Iberia or Aer Lingus appear to be stuck.

One commenter at Head for Points contacted the call center about moving Avios to/from Iberia and was told to file a support ticket with Iberia. Maybe it would be possible for Iberia and/or British Airways to make something happen on the back end in an emergency situation, but I wouldn’t count on being able to do that expeditiously. Instead, if you need to book an Avios award, be careful about which Avios program you choose for your transfer.

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