A few years ago, American Express made some tweaks whose (unintentional) byproduct was that users could self-refer. Late 2018, I wrote a post asking users to avoid self-referral, fast forward a little later and we saw users getting shutdown for self-referral. At the time, my suggestion to avoid self-referral was based on the fact (a) allowing self-referral was an obvious oversight and (b) everyone was carelessly encouraging people to self refer to a point that it just had to die. Back then, I was suggesting people “self-refer” by referring to someone within the family. You could have essentially played referral ping-pong with your SO, parents, siblings, etc.
Fast forward a little bit into the future, there were clawbacks (and even shutdowns [1] [2]) due to some referral shenanigans. Some people who self-referred also lost their ability to refer.
Fast forward to few weeks ago, I referred by SO for Amex business Platinum. A little later, I see a new 45,000 bonus points offer for referral on my personal Platinum.
This is quite literally one of the best offer platinum card ever had, especially if referring within the household. So, was thinking maybe this is a good time to refer someone in the family or even update the referral links in the sidebar of this website, attempt to get the referral link, and get hit with a warning saying “you are not eligible to access this referral offer at this time”. Side note, the website says that the last time I updated referral links on the sidebar was in the summer of 2019. I know the referral links on the sidebar have been expired for far longer than a year but they are working now. I always appreciate any and every referral bonuses sent out my way, regardless of how small they might be.
Anyway, turns out, I’m not the only one who lost their referral privilege for referring within the household.
On March 17, 2021, a user comments on Doctor of Credit:
I’ve never self referred, but did refer 2 people in my house with same address. My personal card’s referral ability got removed last year, but business card can still do it. So weird.
On March 17, 2021, a user comments on Frequent Miler :
Weird. Just noticed tonight that I can’t do any Amex referrals. I had never self referred or seen anything like that on my account before. I had even referred a family member a few days ago without issue. Weird.
It is worth mentioning that there is at least one workaround to this. You can see that I can access the referral page again. Unfortunately, this method may be temporary fix and perhaps even more unfortunate thing is the fact special referral offers (like the 45k offer I had) might (at least be temporarily) lost. For obvious reasons, I won’t spell out the details but it should not be terribly difficult to figure out what I did to get it working.
8/13 Update: I asked reddit for few more DP and here they are [1] [2] [3]. There is also a counter data point so my linked parent comment might be worth checking out.
Closing Remark
I am not sure if they will claw back on household referral like they did with self-referrals.
At best, this is an unintentional bug on whatever code they are using to track self-referral. At worst, this is intention.
