American Express Membership Rewards - How BIZARRE -- re-assigned closed account # for new account!!!

I have a business AMEX. Then for a year I had a personal AMEX. 5-10 months ago I closed the personal AMEX.

Today, I applied for DH to get a personal DL AMEX. I got the approval email and guess what? They have assigned him my CLOSED ACCOUNT NUMBER :eek:

Granted, the email doesn't contain the whole 14-16 digit card number, only the last FIVE digits. But those 5 are the same 5 of my closed account!

That is additional frustrating (besides bizarre) for book keeping -- I like to reference the last 4 digits of a CC when making notes :rolleyes:

Anyway, what are the odds?

Granted, the email doesn't contain the whole 14-16 digit card number, only the last FIVE digits. But those 5 are the same 5 of my closed account!

That is additional frustrating (besides bizarre) for book keeping -- I like to reference the last 4 digits of a CC when making notes :rolleyes:

Actually the odds are not that bad at all. As far as I know, only 1 of the last five digits of an Amex card number is actually part of the account number. The other 4 are related to basic/supplementary card indication, card reissue count and check digits.

I would guess the odds are better than 1 in 100 that any two given first-issue basic member cards will have the same last five digits.

All of my AMEX cards had roughly the same last 4 digits, they just increased, i.e. xxx1, xxx2, xxx3.
The other numbers were all different though, I figured this was some sort of internal AMEX thing

Well, all basic accounts will appear xy00z, with x and z being random, and y being the number of cards you've gone through (on one of my accounts, I'm on 7 :o). So, for new accounts, you have a 1/100 chance of getting the same last five.

Not odd at all. The way card numbering works, your account number is neither the first set of digits nor the last. It's somewhat complicated and it varies by issuing bank and country, but typically your actual account number is the 6 or 7 digits more or less in the middle. The first numbers usually designate issuer (Visa, MasterCard, Amex, etc), bank, country and currency while the last number(s) are used to check the validity of the number as a whole (so as to ensure the number is not a counterfeit.) Some banks will also use some of the numbers for specific card types or products, leaving only about half the sequence (and mostly in the middle) as an actual account number.

So the consensus is that it's merely a 'coincidence' that we got my old account number back....clearly only shocking to me :p

we got my old account number back...

:rolleyes: You got one digit of your old account number back.

I have Amex cards that end -61001 and -82001. I would bet real actual money that there are several other posters reading here who have exactly these same digits.

:rolleyes: You got one digit of your old account number back.

I have Amex cards that end -61001 and -82001. I would bet real actual money that there are several other posters reading here who have exactly these same digits.

For sure, I have 4 AMEX cards, 2 of them end with -71007. In fact haha the first 4 numbers are the same as well, but naturally so they are since the first few digits identify the card type and bank.

The 1001, or whatever is pretty much on every card. Almost every card I've seen ends in something similar to that.

The Amex card number is made of 5 fields, the first 2 digits are always 37 :

37AA-BBBBBB-BCDDE

long time ago, the AA field was used to code the base currency of the account outside of the US (and thus the country). This changed a bit after credit cards (Optima cards) were launched in the 80's, they became their own AA value. In the US, many different values for AA exists also for charge cards.

AA field : base currency code (usually), many different values used in the US

BBBBBBB field : "account number" , with different variants. Centurion or older Platinum accounts usually begin with 88 etc.

C field : card sequence number. Begins with 1, become incremented each time a new card number has to be assigned (after a loss/theft of the card for instance).

DD field : "00" for the main card, "01" for the first supplementary card, etc.

E field : Check digit, computed using the LUHN-10 algorithm.


To answer the question of the poster : the last 5 digit block of the card number is NOT the account number.

The Amex card number is made of 5 fields, the first 2 digits are always 37 :

37AA-BBBBBB-BCDDE

long time ago, the AA field was used to code the base currency of the account outside of the US (and thus the country). This changed a bit after credit cards (Optima cards) were launched in the 80's, they became their own AA value. In the US, many different values for AA exists also for charge cards.

AA field : base currency code (usually), many different values used in the US

BBBBBBB field : "account number" , with different variants. Centurion or older Platinum accounts usually begin with 88 etc.

C field : card sequence number. Begins with 1, become incremented each time a new card number has to be assigned (after a loss/theft of the card for instance).

DD field : "00" for the main card, "01" for the first supplementary card, etc.

E field : Check digit, computed using the LUHN-10 algorithm.


To answer the question of the poster : the last 5 digit block of the card number is NOT the account number.

Very good post, thank you ^

:rolleyes: You got one digit of your old account number back.

I have Amex cards that end -61001 and -82001. I would bet real actual money that there are several other posters reading here who have exactly these same digits.Very sorry I didn't know YOUR account numbers and the accounting systems at AMEX. No need to be rude :td:

Not trying to be rude -- a little frustrated perhaps. It seemed there were several fairly adequate explanations showing that the account number was not being re-used, but that's exactly what you repeated in your second post.

I have a personal green card and a separate corporate card - both have the same last four digits. Makes it interesting when I look at something (like a car rental site) where I may have used both in the past.

several fairly adequate explanations showing that the account number was not being re-used, but that's exactly what you repeated in your second post.

Which is a polite way of saying to ALadyNCal: You may want to edit your title & previous post as they are not accurate.

A bit off-topic but still kind of odd, in my opinion at least, is that my gold card contains as it's 5th through 11th numbers my old cell phone number from several years ago. Perhaps it's a common occurence, but it seems rather strange they would do that.