This is just in folks, you tell me if it is fake or real news.

American Airlines is jumping on the crypto bandwagon and is launching its own cryptocurrency called "FLY" on July 4th, 2017. "With estimated 650,000 million passenger miles being flown every year in the US alone, this is a game changer for American Airline", said an American Airline spokesperson on the condition of anonymity.

American Airline (AA) will do an ICO and will accept the conversion of existing frequent flyer miles to the new FLY at the ratio of 20,000 miles to 100 FLY token effectively pricing the FLY initially at $1. People converting the miles into FLY during ICO will get 20% bonus, getting 120 FLY tokens for every 20,000 miles redeemed. All miles must be converted to FLY by end of 2017 after which the miles will expire and can no longer be redeemed. FLY tokens can also be purchased during ICO at the rate of 75 cents per token effectively getting a discount of 25%. FLY tokens can also be purchased using some of the more popular cryptos such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, Ripple, Litecoin and Steem.

This move comes in the wake of rising trend of usage of cryptocurrencies and to avoid the exorbitant transaction fees that credit card companies charge. This also will allow AA to handle international transactions with ease and will simplify its back end systems as it will not have to maintain the flight pricing information in a multitude of currencies and also will obviate the problems with foreign currency fluctuations. AA spokesperson further mentioned that "at American Airline, we keep our customer's interest first, and as a result, the benefit that AA will realize will be passed on to the customers and will be reflected in lower fares".

Industry analysts are predicting that this move may not be an isolated move and soon other airlines will follow the suite. There are also ongoing talks being held amongst other airlines CEOs to make "FLY" tokens as transferable across airlines thus ushering a new era of portability of frequent flyer miles across the airlines. This will substantially reduce the marketing overhead for all the airlines. United Airline and Southwest airline couldn't be reached for comments. It is believed that Southwest airline will not participate in this program as the systems at Southwest Airlines are not geared for this kind of transition due to their very unique nature of frequent flyer rewards program.

Disclaimer: I am not supportive or against or have any affiliation with any airline mentioned in this post.

Analysis

This is obviously a fake news. I am certain about it is because I created the story about an hour ago to drive home a few points and hoping that this will open eyes of some of the gamblers who are just jumping into this enticing world of cryptocurrency without doing any due diligence and are likely to lose all or a portion of their wealth to the scams that are ubiquitous now. Key takeaways:

1. A casual observer will perform casual fact check and will convince himself/herself that the story is indeed true as the data in terms of passenger miles is correct as it is obtained from Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The data on redemption of frequent flyer miles to USD is taken from American Airline website.
2. Because there are quotations from so-called spokespersons, the story appears believable. Nobody should believe a story when actual source is not cited. Readers should further investigate the credibility of the source.
3. The story uses the propaganda technique of "transfer" wherein by the use of word "token" and mentions of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, the story is leading the person to believe that this FLY coin utilizes Blockchain technology. The only blockchain that is being used by the propagandist is the chaining of the prey using the mental blocks that they have.

I hope you liked the post and hope that you don't lose your hard-earned wealth to widespread cryptocurrency scams.

If you do please, upvote and resteem. I read all the comments with great interest and respond to most of them. That is the best part of Steemit posts. So please, comment away!!