To be honest, I think the Amex reps are wrong. My member since date was originally 2003, which was clearly a mistake as I would have been too young to have a credit card at that age and was never authorized on my parents accounts. I ended up applying for a BMO credit card, and they questioned me about the start date of my Amex cards and wouldn't grant the approval until I called Amex to have it changed (not sure why it was such a big deal to them...). The Amex reps said they could change it to 2009 quite easily and it wouldn't reflect on my credit report - later, all four cards showed up on my Equifax report as new accounts, and my score ended up dropping quite a bit.