It is better for your credit report if you pro-actively close the account yourself rather than wait for the bank to do it. I say shut it down ASAP and move on.

small banks are more human than algorithms in big banks. find a small bank and have personal banker informed about type of transactions you plan to make. if there is an issue that banker would call you before any shut down

Wife and I just got completely axed by@m3x. Call was from Phoenix at 5:30pm central yesterday with no explanation.

This is highly unusual! Many people have done tons of MS on the Old Blue Cash card and others without getting banned.

What kind of business do you do with their competition? Perhaps there's a previously unknown trigger somewhere, and your shutdown was not completely at random.

This is your reason.

Not sure about that, Ive had a return payment too once.

Interesting. Many that have Amex cards have had Serve and Redbird shut down, MSing 10's of thousands per month, if not more, many bonuses, overspending at Staples, etc. and have not been shut down. Seems to me one return payment wouldn't trigger a complete shutdown.

Yes, the two events were not even coincidental (being 3 months apart). I got the impression from the story that this shutdown was reviewed by human(s). So I would look for more events that could reasonably be correlated to higher risk for the bank, and something they would be unwilling to disclose (low-equity mortgage, traffic citations, large medical charges to their CC's, who knows).

It certainly can. It's thought that returned payments are viewed as much worse that lates. It's the difference between being forgetful and being bankrupt!

It's not that you were a bad boy / girl once, it's that a returned payment or other can things draw human eyes, which might not like what they're seeing, which leads to the shutdown. The return payment is just the first domino.

But OP said that all his spending are organic, what story can the human eye can see? it must be something beyond those organic spending.

Are refunds/returns considered a trigger for shutdown? Didn't know that.

When I flip a house I have multiple returns/refunds on my Amex cards during the 90 to120 days of remodeling and it's never been a problem. Earlier this year I had to return a commercial Viking stove that was damaged during delivery and I had already paid the Amex CC I charged it on and Amex didn't give me any troubles with the large refund amount. I guess it could be a YMMV thing.