Account Suspended/Deleted/Closed at MyPoints? Here’s What to Do

Every couple of months, it seems like, MyPoints goes through and freezes a bunch of accounts it has determined are fraudulent, and I’ll notice an increase in the number of complaints across the internet that, “MyPoints disabled my account and I don’t know why, and I complained and got a response from the MOPS team, whatever that is, and I get a canned response that I cheated, but I didn’t.”
In early March, I was reading about the latest round of MyPoints account suspensions on a thread at DISboards.com (a great forum for Disney fans, btw). People were posting that they had been accused of having multiple accounts, a violation of MyPoints’ Terms of Service, and they insisted that they didn’t and that they were only receiving impersonal canned responses from MyPoints and couldn’t get through to a real person to plead their case.
Well, now you can. I brought the issue to the attention of a VP contact of mine at MyPoints and he said that he, along with their head of member services which he cc’d in his reply, would personally review any accounts that members claimed were flagged in error as being fraudulent. Please contact me with the email address you used as your MyPoints login, and if there’s a better email address to use for them to contact you back please let me know that one as well. If you can share any information that you have that might help explain why they would have tagged you as fraudulent — for instance, you live in a dorm and share an IP address with other students — that would be helpful. I’ll forward your message to my contacts at MyPoints for investigation. I think they’d prefer it this way rather than me posting their personal email addresses.
I’ve already been able to help several MyPoints members have their accounts reopened. So if your account has been closed, all hope is not lost!
All of the complaints I’ve read about account closures have had one thing in common: multiple accounts with the same IP address. It’s not against MyPoints’ Terms of Service to have multiple accounts in a household, but if you and your spouse are logging in one right after the other every day, that’s going to look like the same person working both accounts. If you’re sharing a computer with a friend, anytime two email addresses access MyPoints with the same IP, it’s going to look fishy.
Another issue that I discussed with the MyPoints VP is that if you are ever doing one of those offers with a page of yes/no questions to join various programs or sign up for different newsletters or contests, and you see MyPoints listed, even if you say NO when it asks you if you want to join MyPoints (since you already have a MyPoints account), sometimes overzealous MyPoints affiliates will sign you up anyway. This is something MyPoints takes seriously and they’ll take action against those affiliates when they find out about it. It’s important that if this happens to you, you do NOT click the link to confirm your new MyPoints account on an alternate email address if you’re already a member!
Fraud is a huge problem for rewards programs, particularly those that offer “free” points that don’t require you to spend a dime, like MyPoints does with its paid emails, polls, surveys, and contests. I can’t imagine how difficult it is to police a huge program with millions of members. They have some kind of system in place to flag cheaters, but I think sometimes honest people are caught up in the net. MyPoints is admitting that this is a possibility, and they’re willing to investigate. I think that’s a huge step in the right direction.
If you’re not already a member of MyPoints and you’d like to check it out, please join MyPoints here (aff) — thanks!

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