Should you buy Avios points on eBay?

Sellers are advertising Avios points at a huge discount

If you need to get your hands on a chunk of Avios quickly, then your options are limited. You could buy points from British Airways, but that can be costly depending on how many points you need. An alternative option, presented by Google when you search for “Buy Avios Online”, is to purchase points through eBay. Some listings have points at 20% of the price of buying them directly. With that level of discounting, you might think you have nothing to lose.

What’s on offer on eBay

At the time of writing, there are countless options to buy Avios from eBay sellers. You can see these results in the screenshot below, taken from Google.

Avios bundles on offer range from 30,000 points up to 90,000 points, with prices from £84 up to £399. The cheapest option will give you points at a cost of 0.093p per Avios. That rate is 10% of the cheapest way to buy direct from BA.

The pricing on the ebay listings isn’t particularly logical

• One buyer is selling 30,000 Avios for £99.90
• Another is selling 90,000 points for £83.90
• One listing has 60,000 Avios for sale for £399.40

The wide range of prices is already raising red flags. Could you really get 90k points for less than £100?

Is it legal to buy Avios points from eBay?

Whilst it might not be illegal, it violates the British Airways terms and conditions. They state that you cannot buy, sell or transfer points via an unauthorised third party. Buying from Avios.com is fine. Buying from an unknown seller on eBay is not. That leaves you open to losing points, or, worse, having your BA Club account permanently closed.

At stake isn’t just the points you buy, but all the points you have. That feels like an oversized risk to take.

Putting BA aside, eBay itself doesn’t even allow the selling of loyalty points. So that means you’re buying points from a platform that prohibits the sale, and transferring them into a platform that disallows that too. Whilst it prohibits those sales, it still carries the auctions, which suggests that eBay is not doing a great job of policing its own site.

How do you actually get the Avios?

This is the trickier part. If you were to buy points – and IMHO you should never buy Avios points from an eBay seller – how do you actually get them?

It may be that the seller sends you an invite to join their household account. That gives you access to a shared pool of points. It also gives the other party access to your points. They could use your points for a flight or hotel booking, meaning you end up in a worse position than when you started. You are also locked into that household account with them: you cannot leave it for six months.

It could also be that they pay to transfer the points to you. You can transfer Avios points from one account to another, for free if you are Gold or higher. For everyone else, there is a £50 fee, and that allows you to transfer up to 60,000 points per time, and up to a maximum of 200,000 points per year.

Given the cost of the transfer and the prices being quoted on eBay, it seems unlikely that they could turn a profit this way.

I reached out to one seller who asked me to pay half the sum up-front via PayPal. I can only assume this would be away from eBay, so the transaction would not be carried out through their site and would not have the same protection. They would transfer half the points, and then a second balancing payment would mean that I got the final half of the points.

Where do the seller’s points come from?

Given the low cost of Avios being offered on eBay, the source of those points could be questioned. It’s possible that some sellers are selling points that they have obtained through illegal means.

It’s also possible that some sellers do not even have points to sell. Most, but not all, of the accounts currently selling Avios have either no reviews or only negative ones.

Should you buy Avios points from eBay sellers?

Absolutely not. Given that both British Airways and eBay strictly prohibit this, the risks you’re taking are just far too great. Add to that the concern that sellers might be transferring stolen points to you, and it makes no sense to bid on them.

If you need to boost your points balance and you want to do it quickly, there are a few different legitimate ways to do this. Some are cheaper than others. I wrote about this in a lot more detail in my article on “What is the cheapest way to buy Avios“, but here’s a summary:

1. The absolute cheapest way is to use the Avios Boost function. This allows you to take almost any transaction that has earned you points and then double, triple or quadruple the points you got. The price is 0.92p per point, and you can boost points you got from your credit card, flight, Uber trips, Avios Shopping earnings, or points from a Barclays bank account. The points are instant.
2. The second cheapest way is to have an Avios Subscription. The downside is that the points are given to you over a period of time, and you pay every month. That means if you need a large number of points now, it might not be the right solution. This is best used when you have a long-term points goal. The cost is between 1.2p and 1.3p per point.
3. Finally, you can buy points outright from Avios. This is instant, but it’s also the most expensive option, with prices ranging from 2.45p to 1.78p per point depending on how many you buy.