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Gary Leff reads his Points.com junkmail so you and I don’t have to:

Points.com is offering 5000 American, USAirways, or Alaska miles for upgrading to a ‘Gold’ membership for $49.95. The membership isn’t worth much, but buying miles at one cent apiece is generally a good deal.
There’s no clear expiration date on the offer, so verify that your mileage choice is available before offering up payment.

1 cent per mile is a good deal if and only if you’re redeeming your miles for more than 1 cpm. Which I strongly encourage, of course. (See here for the full tutorial on maxing out your miles’ value.) If you need to top up your account to get an award in one of those three airlines, this may not be a bad way to do it.

The “gold membership,” besides having that Austin-Powers-esque ring to it, is truly worthless as a service. As I’ve said before, Points.com is really a bad deal for customers looking to swap points between programs. Having a customer service phone number to help you make those poor-value swaps is hardly an enhancement.

Click here to log in to points.com and see the offer. If you decide to go for it, be sure you select the right reward. The default selection is *not* 5000 miles.

What’s more, you need to make sure you cancel your gold membership before they start automatically renewing it every year. Caveat emptor.