Do we have any DPs on people being shutdown on this AM*Ex +3x referral promo? Raking in so many points it's absolutely nuts.

Last time I heard Amex RAT is alive and well. AMEX have well established history of crawling back points and shutting down account after the fact.

Am I being paranoid if my capital one statement is a day late and I’m anticipating a shutdown?

I have an account with them that has been used very lightly. This week they just reduced my CL by half for low credit utilization.

Don't lose any sleep yet, both of my personal card statements were two days late this month.

This month they changed from a fixed cycle date to a floating cycle date. That pushed all of my statement dates out 3 days. You're probably seeing the same.

Is there a general consensus on the relative safety of MS with the AmEx gold card at grocery stores? I haven't done much MS with AmEx since they stopped awarding points at Simon (how I miss the glory days of MSing Starpoints!!!), but with the WM Metabank shutdown, I'm thinking I might MS on my Gold card using US Bank VGCs up to the annual limit (spread out over several months). Is the RAT team onto this activity/clawing back points etc. as a general rule?

As with all things, it really depends on how you go about it.

If you are buying a $500 GC once a week along with your groceries, I highly doubt that the furry critters are going to care. It is not unusual for people to have a $500 a week grocery bill. However, if you think that whiskers aren't going to twitter when they sniff out someone doing $1000/day at a grocer, then you must think that you live in a kind and benevolent world :o

Amex is such a drag, almost anything can get you in trouble there. It seems that many grocery stores (alteast around here) report level 3 data to the credit card company, so they may be able to see exactly what you are buying. I'm not sure if GCs are specifically excluded from the gold Card terms and conditions but I'd definitely tread lightly.

Capped benefits (like the 4X on Personal Gold) should be somewhat safer than uncapped ones (like the 4X from the referral offers). If they leave them uncapped, it's more likely to be a honeypot than a mistake.

Ditto. A mass wave of shutdowns yesterday with people losing millions of pending points thanks to being able to stack the uncapped extra 3x on the Gold card.

Apparently it wasn't as massive as everyone thinks. According to MPD it was a few dozen of the more brazen abusers who went too far and used one Amex card to BP another. Supposedly most others who used PPK are still alive and oinking.

The consensus was that capped categories are "safe". However, Amex proved they are petty enough to do clawbacks on the $7,500 capped Bonvoy grocery promo this past summer. So I would guess any limited-time promos, even with a cap, are now potentially unsafe. I think it's more likely Amex will do clawbacks on the Platinum intro 6-month 10x grocery bonus before they do anything with the Gold card.

No one knows how many shutdowns occurred, even Vinnh. “Mass wave” was definitely an exaggeration though. Regardless of the number, it’s enough to get eyes on PPK.

True, this has a shady secret society feel to it, so we'll never know. Some brag about making "a killing" and getting away, others post DPs that 20-30k of bill pays did them in. I'm sure RATs will eventually claw back the loot of many who survived. I wasn't dumb enough to push Amex like this so I don't really care.