There were/are some BG that would offer payouts by bill paying your CC account. I think that is what liw5215 is referring to.

Are you not able to see how confused your statements are? If you barter apples for oranges because you like fruit salad, you will find that you're only left with oranges.

The very transparent and traceable nature of card transactions disqualifies them for ML purposes. What your last sentence describes is, in fact, the production of the problem ML wants to get rid of: cash. Throwing GCs into this makes matters only worse. Or are they illegal now?

Anyway, we're getting sidetracked. OP's descriptions suggest nothing along the lines of ML. They may have been caught in a wide dragnet without their own fault. There have been various reports like this recently, and the protestations of innocence are all plausible. I'm not sure if it makes sense for those people to file an arbitration claim.

You are right. We are getting sidelined. Most cruise ship casinos are operated by outside companies, usually not the cruise lines themselves. So I am uncertain as to who actually sees the transactions between the cruise line, operating company and Amex. But I suspect Amex has all the details.They certainly shut him down. And what is he going to arbitrate for? I believe somewhere in that 40 page contract is the terms like....MR points are the property of Amex and may be revoked at any time... or something like that.

I am still wondering if that poster still can sail with that cruise line. (Even if the cruise line's bottom line wasn't hurt by his transactions).

As an aside, a very very interesting article from the WSJ on MLing. (Behind a paywall, but Google is your friend :))
Bags of Cash From Drug Cartels Flood Teller Windows at U.S. Banks

it's 2 different things arbitrating to reinstate amex accounts vs getting back some value for the lost MR points. the latter could be worthwhile is there are a lot of points and one isnt really MS-ing at scale

That is something that is new to me. There are only very limited options to do bill payment on CC accounts. And it is suicidal to get BGs involved with your own CC accounts. And this is somehow related to Chinese CC accounts. Not sure if there is any substance from that.

Just because it’s new to you doesn’t mean there’s no substance. If you check Chinese forums, you’ll see a lot of DPs where there was a wave of SDs.

i have read about it, but im not sure how it's being done. afaik, amex doesnt like it when someone else pays off your credit card bills, so how is it that the buying group are bill paying amex? was it something amex missed or?

That sucks. Does anybody have experience of Chase SDs similar to this?

I would say very little substance. And there was no "wave" of SDs.

First, in Chinese financial market, very few people use credit cards. Most of the CCs are UnionPay. AmEx CCs in China is insignificant. AmEx actually launched two debits cards in China, with the help of AliPay. AliPay itself is far behind WeChat Pay.

With the above, there is no "premium" credit card market in China. It is unthinkable for some common Chinese consumers to pay like $695 for the Platinum card.

It makes more sense if those SDs were related to the debit cards, for the BG bill payments. Even if there were "waves" of SDs related to those debit card, the impact is insignificant.

From what I know of the BGs and the Chinese financial market, I'd say the previous shut downs had very limited, or little impact. Very few Chinese consumers play the mile and point games.

clueless12 is referring to chinese forums used by chinese living in the US
被AMEX杀全家了😭 - 玩卡 / 信用卡 - 美卡论坛

Those are the some of the Chinese cardholders in America. It is not about the BG groups in China. AmEx has little market share in China. There is no such thing of BGs in China, or related to China.

I know exactly what caused the past "waves" of AmEx SDs. I've done that and it may still work with other cards. There are some MS plays that people do not want to share. Some banks caught some of those. Some do not. MS plays come and go. Eventually they all die. Then new ones come along.

Even most of the bloggers do not have much clue. Of all the forum that I read, there is about 25%-30% that is correct of those AmEx SDs. Most of the others are just pure speculations. Or clueless.

I got shut down years ago by capital one due to the fact that I ran the score up on them (almost 7 figures a month).

I tried to apply again and it was shut down within a month. I have gotten Kohl's cards, bass pro shop, and they always get shut down by capital one.

My "take it easy no MS" card has always been discover, which I have had for over 15 years now, but now this..... :(

This is an excellent post.
What many of younger MSers may not realize is that adverse consequences of their behavior on a credit card may produce decades or even life-long consequences of that behavior.

This person did something that resulted in being banned by a bank. Now that bank is buying another bank that he/she has a credit card in use, and the consequences may be that this card, that they have used legitimately for decades, may be shuttered as well.

Some banks, such as Chase will let malefactors back in (although it is uncertain what their criteria is for such readmission), but it seems from several DPs that Cap1 and Amex are not so lenient..Just need to keep that in mind when MSing.

Yep, I mainly use discover for business expenses, but it would be a pain to have to redo a bunch of monthly auto payments.

I got shut down by SunTrust back in the day as well, but my BB&T account survived becoming Truist.

I have lots of credit cards, just discover has always been the easiest to use.

You’re missing the whole thing. It has nothing to do with Chinese financial markets.

There are American Chinese people who get American credit cards, who have forums (in Chinese), who do BGs, who share modified CC links, etc.