This morning, I received an email from Amex stating that a portion of my MR points were cancelled. When I logged in to check, I found out that I was short of 30k points. The email explained that the deduction might be due to a downgrade or certain offers not complying with the rules. After making a phone call, I was told that the 30k points were clawed back because I bought gift cards at a supermarket which is against the rules.

Indeed, this year I bought 25k of MO to take advantage of the Gold Card 5x referral. But I thought that apart from the sign-up bonus, Amex doesn't really care about this. Plus, each transaction was between $480-490, definitely not $505.95. I don't know how it triggered the alert. Anyone got similar DPs?