How to Sell Your Points Safely

The realistic risk picture

Let's start with the uncomfortable part, because a safety guide that skips it is just marketing. There are scam buyers in this market. Points and miles are valuable, the transactions happen online between strangers, and the selling side is full of first-timers who have never done this before. That combination attracts fraud the way it does in any secondhand market, from used cars to concert tickets.

But the risk is concentrated, not ambient. Nearly all of it lives in two places: anonymous person-to-person deals arranged on forums and classifieds, and fake "brokers" that exist only as a slick website and a payment demand. The scams themselves follow a handful of predictable scripts, which is good news. Predictable scripts can be screened for. By the end of this page you will be able to run that screen in about five minutes.

What makes points selling feel scarier than other online sales is the asymmetry. Points transfer instantly and irreversibly, while a payment promise is just words until money lands. So the entire safety question reduces to one thing: do you have enough verified, findable information about the buyer to trust them during the gap between transfer and payment? Everything below is a tool for answering that question before the gap opens.

(If you want the background on what a legitimate broker actually does with your points, read how points brokers work first. This article is about telling the real ones from the imitations.)

The scams that actually happen

Four patterns account for nearly everything sellers report.

• The upfront fee. The "buyer" agrees to a generous price, then needs a processing fee, escrow deposit, insurance payment, or account verification charge before the deal can close. There is no deal. The fee was always the product.
• The vanishing payment. You transfer the points, or hand over access so the buyer can use them, and then the payment never arrives. Emails bounce. The phone number, if there ever was one, goes dead. This is the classic forum-deal ending.
• The phishing harvest. The purchase is a pretext. The real goal is your full account credentials, password plus security answers, so the scammer can drain the account and often try those same credentials on your email and bank. The tell is credential collection up front, before any offer is verified.
• The too-good-to-be-true rate. A quote dramatically above what anyone else offers, used as bait for one of the three scams above. Real buyers compete within a fairly narrow band, because the downstream value of points is roughly the same for everyone. An outlier offer is not a windfall. It is a hook.

Different costumes, same play: get something from you before you have anything verifiable from them. And note what every version depends on. Anonymity. The scammer needs to be unreachable the moment the script pays off, which is why almost every defense in this article boils down to forcing the buyer to be findable.

Red flags: walk away if you see any of these

Treat each item below as disqualifying on its own. Scammers rarely show just one.

• No real company name, business address, or registration you can look up.
• Payment offered only in cryptocurrency, gift cards, or wires to oddly named accounts.
• Pressure to move fast: the rate "expires tonight," the buyer needs the points "in the next hour."
• Asks for your password and your security answers up front, before any verified offer exists.
• No phone number, or a number nobody ever answers. Chat-only and email-only buyers are anonymous by design.
• No reviews anywhere you can verify, or only testimonials hosted on the buyer's own site.
• Any fee charged to you, under any name, at any stage.

The pressure tactic deserves a second look, because it is the most effective one psychologically. Your points are not melting. A buyer who insists they are is telling you the offer cannot survive a day of scrutiny.

Green flags: what a legitimate buyer looks like

The inverse list, and the one to actually shop with.

• A verifiable business identity: real company name, published address, the kind of footprint that takes years to build and seconds to check.
• A real phone conversation with a named person before anything moves. Not a chatbot. A human who answers questions.
• Payment through a method with a paper trail, like PayPal, so the money is traceable and disputable.
• The rate confirmed in writing before you commit, so there is no ambiguity about what was agreed.
• Zero fees charged to the seller, ever. The broker earns on the spread, not on you.
• Reviews on third-party platforms, attached to real transactions, that you can read yourself.

No single green flag proves legitimacy. All six together are very hard to fake, mostly because faking them costs more than honest brokering pays.

One practical note on checking these. Do the verification yourself, from scratch. Type the company name into a search engine rather than following links the buyer sent you, call the published number rather than the one in their email signature, and read the third-party reviews on the platform that hosts them. Scammers are happy to provide their own "proof." The whole value of a paper trail is that you can walk it without their help, and the walk takes five minutes.

How a safe sale actually flows

Step by step, here is what the legitimate version of this transaction looks like from your side.

1. You request a quote from a buyer you have vetted against the lists above. The quote costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
2. A specialist calls you. A real conversation, before any points move. They verify your account details and ownership, confirm the offer, and answer whatever you ask. You are evaluating them on this call as much as they are verifying you. Use it.
3. The offer is confirmed in writing. Program, balance, payout, payment method. Boring, documented, exactly how money should change hands.
4. The transfer is coordinated with you directly. A person walks through it with you, manually. You are never asked to dump credentials into a web form and hope.
5. You get paid through a traceable method. At iBuyPoints that is PayPal, typically within 1 business day of verification, often the same day.

Notice the sequencing: identity is established, then the offer, then the transfer, then payment follows on a stated timeline. Every scam in the earlier section breaks that order somewhere. The order is the safety mechanism.

What if you think you've already been scammed?

Move fast and keep records. In order:

1. Document everything now. Screenshots of the website, every email and chat message, payment records, usernames, phone numbers. Scam infrastructure gets deleted quickly, so capture it before it vanishes.
2. Report it to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov. The report creates an official record and feeds the data law enforcement actually uses to pursue these operations.
3. Contact your loyalty program. If you shared credentials, change the password and security answers immediately and tell the program the account may be compromised. They can freeze activity and, in some cases, restore stolen balances.
4. Alert your other accounts. If the password you exposed is reused anywhere (email, bank), change it there too. Credential reuse is what scammers are counting on.

None of this guarantees recovery, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But fast reporting limits the damage and occasionally claws something back, and the paper trail you kept is what makes any of it possible.

Why we publish our address and phone number

Here is the sober truth about this niche: trust is the entire product. Anyone can build a website that says "we buy miles." What a seller is really buying, when they choose a broker, is confidence that the payment will arrive after the points move. That confidence cannot be claimed. It has to be checkable.

So iBuyPoints publishes its address, its phone number, and its process, and keeps a page of reviews taken verbatim from our public Google Business profile, precisely because those are the things a scammer cannot comfortably copy. A fake broker does not want a published address. It definitely does not want you calling.

Vet us with the same checklists you would use on anyone else. That is what they are for. Then sell to whoever passes, on a phone call, in writing, with a paper trail. Sold that way, this is a safe transaction. Sold any other way, you are donating points to a stranger.