Does Chase Referral Work After Account Closure by Chase?

Earning referral credits is fun but getting your account closed is no fun. Can you still continue to get referral credit after your account is closed?

This answer to this question may seem obvious and the question itself may seem trivial and click-baity but there are a some reasons for why this question is worth asking and pondering over.

Even after 6+ months from my Chase shutdown, I can still see couple of these cards when I login into my Chase account. A vast majority of my cards disappeared few months ago but some still hang in there.  The important bit is that one of the card that I can still see is Chase Sapphire Reserve. Because I can see the last 4 digits of the card, I can go to Chase referral site and attempt to generate a referral. It works.

Then I pondered if I could generate referral for cards that I used to have but have vanished from my Chase online profile. I don’t have those card anymore so I didn’t have a quick way to lookup the last 4 digits of shutdown Chase cards, but after a bit of thinking, I recalled that the last 4 digits of my cards, including CIP, Hyatt, IHG, and Freedom, were listed out in a letter Chase sent responding to my CFPB complain.

I tried every single one of those last 4 digits and nothing but CSR worked. I think it is safe to say that once a card falls off your Chase online account, you can no longer generate a referral.

But then a question comes up – when all Chase cards have vanished off my online login, will Chase let me back in? Unfortunately, nobody knows the answer to it because shutdown due to large # of accounts and inquires are too new. Maybe it’s an area to explore in the future.

Anyway, getting back to the central question of this post – do these referral links actually work? The answer is a mixture of yes and no. Yes, that link will lead to a referral page. Yes, you can submit an application through that link. In fact, when someone used my referral, I even saw 10,000 pending points still statement closure.

But the referral points never posted into my account. They simply vanished. The referrals don’t work for the same reason that after certain days from shutdown, any remaining Ultimate Rewards points will be zeroed out. This is one of those things that is obvious when someone states them, still someone has to try them to make sure there isn’t a loophole around it. Here is an image of Chase chat rep explaining what I already knew.

So far I’ve been talking about Ultimate Rewards cards but what about Chase co-branded cards that can generate referrals? Well, I received referral from Hyatt between 1-2 months after shutdown.

That was the last time I got a Hyatt referral. This isn’t the most popular offer so the lack of referral definitely doesn’t mean that Chase isn’t handing out referral bonuses. The only way to be certain is by having someone use a referral link, let me know if they get approved, and we wait and see 1-2 months for referral bonus to (not) post. But I don’t want to persuade anyone to use my referral in the name of science, especially because you can often get an additional $50 offer through dummy booking.

Closing Note

Just to clear the air, all referrals I currently share, except Hyatt, is from Chase account that isn’t shutdown. Come to think of it, maybe I should ditch Hyatt referral from sidebar.