James Siminoff - Amex plays dirty

I am the CSO of Ditech Networks Nasdaq (DITC) the founder and former CEO of PhoneTag, founder/principal in NobelBiz and founder/chief evangelist of GRID.com. This blog is about my life as a serial entrepreneur, husband, traveler, inventor and father.

jsiminoff@PhoneTag.com

Amex plays dirty

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I was watching the local NBC news in LA last night and there was a story about Amex closing peoples cards down and taking all of their rewards points. One of the examples they had was a guy with 7,000,000 points which American Express admits was in good standing when his account was shut off. Each point is worth about $0.01 so Amex took a $70,000 profit on their books in taking away the liability.

I have close to 1,000,000 which I have never really been that aggressive at using. Now I am planning to book vacations for the next year using them. Once something is booked I believe that they can not take away the miles then.

I really hope that their strategy backfires and that all of their members like me start to use these miles faster. Amex went from coddling its customers to treating them like enemies.

AMEX Surprises Traveler By Canceling Card Without Warning [Amex] (consumerist.com)
AmEx Now Paying People to Get Lost [Credit Crunch] (cityfile.com)
American Express Will Pay You to Go Away (jossip.com)

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