Originally Posted by
seenitall
But you know the last 4 digits. Look at the AMEX cards listed in the credit report. Toss out the ones for which you do know the whole number or which you know are still active. I assume that there should only be no more than 2 or 3 remaining ones. Then contact AMEX and say you believe the card number that received the refund is either XXXX XXXX XXXX 1234 or YYYY YYYY YYYY 1234 or ZZZZ ZZZZ ZZZZ 1234. That should be a narrow enough set of choices for AMEX to comb through.
I checked all three credit reporting agencies. I found 9 reported Amex cards on one of them and 11 on the other two so the list the agencies have isn't exhaustive. But in addition the numbers from each of the two agencies showing 11 cards don't fully agree with each other so it's clear that the history doesn't include all your cards. Not surprising given that if I remember correctly unlike Visa/MC every time you get a new card from Amex the number changes slightly.
This piqued my interest so I decided to see if my Amex Business Gold was shown on my credit report. It wasn't.
So while it would have been a good idea if all of your credit cards were there it isn't going to work. Besides, this whole matter could be instantly resolved if United would just provide the reference number for the transaction. That's the reason reference numbers exist, so one can locate a given transaction.
But I'll pass the list of numbers to Amex. It can't hurt. Thanks for the suggestion.