Originally Posted by kenbks

Did they advise you not to engage in MS anymore? If not I'd say go on doing what you've been doing. I mean, why give up on sign-up bonus now that you've already passed the FR? They would have shut you down if they didn't like what they saw.

Contrary to all the people who chastised you for engaging in MS and overstating your income (who are these people? I mean this is Flyertalk, where stories of gaming the system for the maximum miles gain is celebrated. What are they doing here then and who made them judges? Hypocrites), I really don't think AMEX knows nor cares whether you buy gift cards or not. Heck, AMEX always are super eager to sell you an AMEX gift card. Why would they care when you buy gift cards to meet the minimum spending requirement, as long as you have the ability to pay them back?

IMO, what triggered FR is your maxing out your new accounts. Your low credit line indicates your credit profile is somewhat risky to begin with. Then you opened up multiple credit cards. And then you maxed them as soon as you got them, which I think set off the alarms. Ideally, you should try to keep your spending under 30% of your line. Going over 50% makes them curious, and going over 80-90% has high possibility of triggering an automatic review, which in AMEX's case may result in FR (and Chase will just close your accounts). If you got $3000 left to spend until Nov, I think that's easily doable. Just try to keep your utilization under 50-60%, and pay off before statement cut-off so that you wouldn't have a big balance reported.