American Express Arbitrarily Closed my Bluebird Card

[Anonymous]

I know it's not a credit card, but I still have to air out some frustration. I work a full-time job, and then I do a lot of odd jobs that pay cash when I get off at my usual time every night. Suffice to say, by the time I'm done all the banks are closed. It's very rare that I have time to go by a bank during normal hours. So I had been using a Bluebird card to load cash on it since it has no loading fees and most Walmarts are open 24 hours. I would then transfer this money to my normal bank account. Well I get an email today telling me that I had violated the terms and conditions and were closing my account. I guess they weren't making any money off me. So I'm a little bummed. Not a huge loss, but less this be a warning to anyone out there who may be using this card for a similar purpose.

[Anonymous]

There have been massive closings of Serve and Bluebird this year (I had 5 under my control closed).  Most of this was for MS, and yours might look like that (load the card with cash and extract to bank, as gift card loads also appear as "cash")

[Discover2016]

I'm confused, I thought the purpose of those reloadable amex's was to load cash onto or am I missing something?

[Anonymous]

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@Discover2016 wrote:

I'm confused, I thought the purpose of those reloadable amex's was to load cash onto or am I missing something?

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The product was aimed at the unbanked/underbanked, and is much cheaper fee-wise than most alternatives.     So you get $50 in cash, load it onto your card, and either use it where Amex is accepted, or use the bill pay feature to pay small bills.

Withdrawing funds to your "real" bank account means they don't get to make any debit swipe fees, and so may be inappropriate use (as well as maybe looking like MS)

That said, long threads on this didn't find any certain pattern: people who did a lot of MS, those that did no MS, those that bought things using the card etc, some set got shutdown whereas other similar people didn't.

[Anonymous]

I use Bluebird as a way to deposit cash (a rare circumstance for me) given that I bank online. It certainly is convenient considering there's a Walmart almost everywhere I go and I don't have to worry about limited business hours. Plus, ACH transfers from Bluebird to my bank are pretty quick.

However, I figure that if I were to do this frequently, that might seem suspicious to Amex. While I trust, OP, that you are not being unethical, there have been quite a few people who have abused Bluebird and used it as a vehicle for fraud. That's why Amex has set limits on the amount of money moved via various transfers and transactions. I believe one can only transfer $1,000 per month between Bluebird and a linked bank account. Perhaps the issue was that you exceeded this limit.

[Anonymous]

they took my serve card because I don't have an amex source to fund it with, was using paypal, whatever.  I got a netspend card but its $4 for the privilege of loading it.  I hear good things about vanilla visa.

[UncleB]

I'm using an 'old' Serve account as a pseudo-savings account for my credit card rewards, but I'm considering changing over to using my NFCU share savings instead.

I like using Serve (same platform as Bluebird) since I can add and withdraw money so many different ways, but I'm afraid the MS folks have messed it up for those of us using it for 'normal' purposes.  Amex has gotten so jumpy that non-MS'ers are getting caught up in account closures, which is unfortunate.

I'm sorry the OP is now being impacted as well. 

[Anonymous]

I started this account in 2013, but I didn't start using it heavily for cash deposits and transfers until June. Between June and now, I loaded abot $3,000 per month and then did transfers to my bank account. I did not do a single swipe transaction since then. Looks like I'll have to visit my bank on my lunch break now, which is inconvenient. 

[Anonymous]

Have you thought about opening an account at a bank or credit union that allows cash deposits through their ATM's?  That would solve your cash and time problem and there shouldn't be a problem for you to push or pull (whichever avoids fees) money into your main checking account if you didn't want to change it.