What a brilliant way to earn frequent flyer points. I’ve always been a bit of a points whore, but this takes the cake.

Coin buyers charged the purchases, sold in boxes of 250 coins, to a credit card that offers frequent-flier mile awards, then took the shipments straight to the bank. They then used the coins they deposited to pay their credit-card bills. Their only cost: the car trip to make the deposit.

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He says his largest single deposit was $70,000 in $1 coins. He used several banks and numerous credit cards. He earned enough miles to put him over two million total at AMR Corp.’s American Airlines, giving him lifetime platinum-elite status — early availability of upgrades for life and other perks on American and its partners around the world.

I used to play the credit card frequent flyer point game, where you sign up for a card to get the initial points then cancel the card for a free flight. But, I’ve never done it to the extreme of Chris Guillebeau at The Art of Nonconformity. Surprisingly, it doesn’t really hurt your credit score. My only question is if there’s away to combine all the points so you have a huge pool of  points versus 30k at one airline and 50k at another.