I woke up last Friday with my cards suspended and lots of red on both of my Amex card accounts telling me to call them immediately where I was met with the financial review department. I have heard of FRs before and I have also heard that they are very rare and with just two cards, I never expected it to happen.
Here's what led to it:
I have been trying hard to hit the SUB on the gold card so I could get the 100K mr points. I got the card at the end of last year and immediately started making large purchases on it. I paid my motorcycle and car insurance in full (a ton of money as a college male). I also started making large purchases getting ready for marriage and graduation and definitely doing some extra spending on top. Despite all of this spending, it was well supported by my jobs and I always paid the entire balance as soon as the charge went through.
AMEX didn't like this, I had been spending much more than my reported 55K income would usually sustain. They had me send them the two most recent pay stubs from my jobs and also my two most recent bank statements. This was after the very inquisitive phone call where I had to explain all my sources of income and how I could manage to cobble together 55k as a college student. After a few business days, it seemed to have worked, mostly.
My Amex BCP CL has remained as 3k but they have assigned my Gold card a 4.3k SL, which doesn't really affect me that much. Anyways, that was my experience, scary, but at least I'm not barred from Amex and I still kept all my MR points.
Will that gold card SL affect my credit?
Will the gold card SL lead to me getting an SL on a future plat card?
@CreditPoor wrote:lol, you didn't go through a FR, you went through a simple income verification and you didn't actually come out ahead.
I'll break it down further. You have a 3k card and now a restricted gold card for 4.3k after submitting some bank statements. In return AMEX got data on you that they now cansell and believe me they make tons off of collected financial data.
I wouldn't classify this as a win because now I'm willing to bet CLIs will be smaller if at all and they'll certainly be keeping an eye on. I'll never understand why people will trade all their data and financials for cards that are rapidly deteriorating. AMEX is not what it used to be to be and hardly worth the hassle
As for Financial Review that would involve tax returns and a much deeper dive and the process is ridiculous if you ask me. They once asked me for tax returns and I told them to kick rocks. I'm not paying a credit card company $695 o years for a card and give them access to information they certainly have demonstrated they can't protect
I'm considering it a win because the alternative was getting kicked to the curb by amex and being barred for about 10 years which Fs up my credit plan greatly. It definitely was a FR, it just seems like they've changed what they asked for few different times. I would've been screwed if they asked for a tax return, a lot of my income is non-taxable or not reported. I'm just happy to survive.