New Round Of American Express Serve & Bluebird Shutdowns

Correct. These are prepaid cards that have no connection to actual American Express credit/charge accounts.

It’s for people who do manufacture spending – there’s always a possibility of your account getting shut down from that.

Which one (Serve/Bluebird) is easier or better for MS? I only have BB

I got an email, yes.

I have the same question – they send out emails to notify the shutdown, right?

Also, what happens to the balance if you get shutdown. Do they send a check or something?

crappy card at best now

Nah, that would be too easy.

In other words, you want more freebies and less costs until all of American Express goes out of business. Seems legit.

Not trying to defend AMEX here, but you’re looking at it from your personal perspective as a churner. Churners are in the minority of AMEX customers, but are likely the most costly. AMEX is a business that exists to make a profit, not to cater to the whims of churners/”gamers”. Shutdowns/clawbacks aren’t a problem for your average AMEX customer, and I’d argue that if you asked 100 random AMEX customers if they’d ever been affected by either, you’d get either 100 no’s or 100 confused looks.

Who are you kidding, them catering to abuse behavior isn’t somehow going to make their business more profitable. You play the game you expect to get burned on occasion, especially if you swim in the deep end of the pool.

I’m with you, Nick. Not once did you say they should go out of business by throwing free money around. The fact remains that ANY/EVERY company has opportunities to improve their products/services. And in doing so, can “amazingly” generate more profit for them. An example would be clarifying the referral rules and process…so no one is accused of a violation…that was never expressly forbidden in the terms. Could have fixed the whole issue with 2 lines of code like a YEAR ago. It’s 100% on *them* for letting it snowball. It’s on the company to properly enforce their own rules as they intend. It’s flat out wrong and quite PETTY of them to go after customers like 8mon after the fact — for their own errors. An example of a potential service improvement would simply be not LYING to customers. If you’ve chatted with or called customer service 10 times, you’ve undoubtedly been lied to at least 3+ times and that’s probably too low of a number. I was told I am not eligible for the Platinum business bonus because I got the Platinum personal bonus. lol That’s just 1 example. The whole concept of “churning” only exists because companies don’t properly value & service their customers — which causes them to seek alternatives. They could invent all kinds of incentives to have you only do business with Amex. Like if you don’t have any other credit accounts added to your credit report in 1yr, you get all annual fees refunded and a +25% bonus on all MR points earned via spend.

I own a lot of their stock. Up 100 percent since I bought right after they lost Costco. They are doing great.

It’s not intended for MS’ers. MS behavior costs them money, would be extremely easy to detect, and they’re getting better at shutting us down.

I’m sure they have plenty of people using the product as intended, as a checking account replacement, paying their monthly fees or load fees and making the product profitable for Amex.

You’ve got to just chalk this up as part of the game – it’s entirely fair on their end.

I’ve read about that… there were a couple very long threads on r/churning back in April/May with DPs of people rolling like you and hitting some kind of limit. It’s as though they have a counter for total prepaid cards on your social and once you hit the limit you can’t open any more. The limit used to be 1 a few years ago (back in the redbird days), so still having 4 on hand is pretty good. Treat them well and hopefully they’ll last you a while.

American Express sold their prepaid business to Incomm, but the cards are still processed through the Amex network.