American Express - Blue cash back card (American Express)

Member Name: Hamed

Product:	American Express
Date:	30/03/07 (260 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: cash back IF WORKS...

Disadvantages: MISCALCULATIONS... BAD customer service

Well okay the cash back feature seems very attractive, IF it works. My bad experiences started when I noticed a significant shortage in my first year's cash back. There is a threshold of $6500 that afterwards your cash back rate becomes higher. i.e. if you spend more than $6500 you are supposed to receive 5% cash back on everyday purchases and 1.5% on everything else (before that the percentages are 1% and 0.5%). So clearly if you spend more than $6500 you have to receive 6500*1.5% AT LEAST. However this amount should be much more since you should have a lot of purchases which qualify for 5% cash back (simple math so far). Having said this the amount which I received was even less than 6500*0.5% whereas I had spent much more than the 6500 threshold (three mistakes so far). I gave them a call to resolve this issue for 4 TIMES!! EVERY TIME I was told that the system does not work or it is under maintenance and I should give them a call back in a day or so and when I did, again I was told that I should call later! Anyway I decided to cancel the card and after canceling (which is a story of its own), I keep getting finance charges that I have not paid my balance in full. This is where their own website has my account paid in full!! Now I have about $80 in finance charges which I don't even know what are they correspond to. MOREOVER the lady whom I talked regarding canceling the account, although agreed with mistake in their calculation didn't give me the rest of my cash back because I was canceling the card which is ridiculous since I had the card for more than one year and I had to get the first year's cash back in full.

For a credit card company the first thing that you expect is not have mistakes in their systems which American Express failed to do so in my personal experience. If you are thinking of getting a card with cash back, there is no competition for Discover or if you are looking for a card which is acceptable worldwide go for the Chase visa which are much better options. Also there are many chain stores which don't accept AMEX simply because they charge them a lot!

Summary: Do not pick this card. Go for either Discover or Chase for cash back