There may be more than one thing going on here. I think it's possible that the level of people gaming the system as you did to get a 35% boost on statement credits got to a level where they decided to do something about it, and their remedy was to go back and change previously-issued ticket refunds from statement credits to MR redeposits. It could very well be that they did that without considering the corner case of what would happen to closed accounts, and that your particular situation was an unanticipated situation. They may have a systems issue that prevents MR deposits from closed accounts for some other reason, and you got caught up in an unfortunate set of circumstances. Put another way, it could be that nobody at Amex mindfully decided that your particular situation should have the outcome that it did.