Travelwithgrant posted screenshots of his new Amex billing statement which includes new terms to exclude cash equivalents and person-to-person payments from being eligible to earn points. The change is found thus far only on Membership Rewards-earning cards, though it might be spreading to other cards like SPG as well.
We are updating the list of transactions that are not eligible purchases and for which you will not earn points by adding: purchases of cash equivalents; Person-to-person payments.
They’ve also clearly exclude Amex gift cards purchased online from earning points.
You can find the Amex Membership Rewards terms here. This is what they look like now:
And this is what they looked like in 2015Â (it’s possible some of the changes came along the way):
‘Cash equivalents’ refers to Visa/MC/Amex gift cards and perhaps bill payment services as well. It probably does not include a closed-loop gift card to a particular merchant, e.g. an Amazon gift card. Interestingly, they specifically mention that American Express gift cards purchases online (meaning direct purchase from Amex) will not earn points; this has never been the case in the past and is pretty surprising given that you can simply pay with a non-Amex credit card instead.
The person-to-person exclusion will limit things like Venmo or Paypal peer payments from earning rewards. It’s a bit of nuisance since the card rewards can help offset fees when paying a friend. Going forward, it’s probably smarter to pay with a no-fee option like a bank/debit, or else to use a non-Amex card.
Of course, all of this this is only language in the terms. In reality, it’s possible nothing will change from a coding perspective, and they’ll just use the new terms to clawback rewards on a case-by-case basis. (The ‘reloadable prepaid cards’ has been in the terms for years, as pictured above.) Certainly purchases at CVS or the grocery will earn points, but they could manually review and exclude purchases of $505.95, especially if they have level-3 data at that merchant.
Regardless, the RAT team is clearly hard at work. Previously they focused primarily on tightening their terms regarding signup bonuses (we rounded these up in this post), and now they are targeting regular rewards.
