I spend a lot of money on credit cards. Often $20K/month, sometimes much more. And I always pay them off in full every month – well, except during my divorce in Hays county, TX. But that’s another (long) story.
I spend a lot of money on business travel, and I fly on Delta a lot. I got offered a Delta AMEX business card that had a $650 annual fee, but it had great benefits. I have never had a card with annual fees, but the benefits on this card would make it worth it for the business. But only if I could spend enough on it. Spending enough would require a credit limit of at least $30K. That’s $15K a month in travel, but with credit cards you need a limit greater than your monthly spend because of the time it takes you to get the bill and for the bill to get paid. My company’s accounts pay bills the last day they can, so the credit limit needs to be about twice the monthly spend. My company agreed that getting the card made sense.
So I applied for the card. I asked for a $50K credit limit, and I made a notation that the card wouldn’t be usable to me with a credit limit of less than $30K and I instructed them to not issue me a card unless the credit limit was at least $30K.
On the application, they wouldn’t let me enter my business mailing address for invoices. They insisted on a physical address. All other AMEX cards the business has are sent to the PO box. And mail isn’t deliverable to the business’ physical address. So, after sending the application, I sent a message to AMEX via their secure messaging system notifying them that invoices would have to be sent to the PO Box.
Some time later, I received the business card. I activated it and used it once for a purchase around $400 to be sure it worked and set it aside to use for business travel.
A couple of months later, my PERSONAL AMEX cards got frozen. All of them. I logged onto the AMEX site and it showed that the BUSINESS card was late. Strike one. AMEX’ forced mixing of personal and business cards wasn’t pleasant. I’d had issues in the past where they misapplied personal payments and froze business cards and vice versa. AMEX also reported the late payment on the business card on my PERSONAL credit report and charged a late fee of about $150.
When I looked at the business card’s invoice, AMEX had ignored my message about the mailing address – a secure message I sent AMEX through their own system. They’d sent the bill to the business physical address and it (surprise, surprise) had been returned.
While I had the bill up, I saw that they’d sent the card with a $8500 credit limit. WHAT?! I specifically told them to NOT send me a card with a $650 annual fee with a credit limit of less than $30K because it would NOT pay off!
So I called AMEX. First, I tried getting the address fixed. AMEX insisted that it’s not possible for them to send bills to a PO Box. OK, that’s the only way my company (and many, many other companies) receive bills. Really? Yes, they said. Really. Not possible.
I pulled up a business AMEX bill for another card that had been sent to the business’ PO Box. I sent it to them. “Oh”, they said. “I need to talk to a manager”. Two hours of sitting with their Indian call center wasting my personal time later, they had the billing address sorted out.
All the while, AMEX aggressively demanded that I pay the invoice. I asked them to remove the late fees because they mailed the invoice to an undeliverable address. They refused. I asked them to cancel the card and remove the $650 annual fee because they had sent me a card I specifically told them not to. They refused. They said that my use of the card was implicit approval of their terms and I was responsible.
They pissed me off. I paid the $400 or so for the one charge I made on the card. They demanded that I pay the rest, and I refused. I told them to cancel the card on the phone and they refused. They kept shunting me to different people who kept trying to talk me into keeping the card. I refused and told them to cancel the card and they flat refused to do so. After another three hours of my wasted time talking to their Indian call center, I hung up the phone and wrote them a letter telling them to cancel the card.
A month or so later, I received another bill. With another $150 late fee. They hadn’t canceled the card. I called them on the phone again. Finally got them to cancel the card. But they insisted I’d have to pay the $650 activation fee and over $400 in late fees and interest.
I told them I wasn’t going to do it, that they ignored my instructions to cancel the card and they needed to remove the second late fee because they didn’t cancel the card and the first late fee because they mailed the invoice to the wrong address. I reminded them that they sent me a card with an unusably low credit limit – I couldn’t buy a single ticket to some of my destinations with it’s credit limit.
I looked at my company’s AMEX spending. My company typically spent $50K a month with AMEX. I looked up how much AMEX gets paid for credit card transactions. It’s 2.5-3.5%. AMEX was making $1,250-$1,750 a month on my businesses credit card transactions. And I typically spent $20K/mo on my personal AMEX. That’s another $500-$700/month in revenue.
I told AMEX that if they didn’t remove this unreasonable charge, I was going to discontinue the use of all of my AMEX cards and I was going to ask my company to do the same. They were going to lose more money a month on their skim off the top fees than the total of my bill, even with the inappropriate late fees and interest. They still refused to let it go.
So I told my company about the experience and asked if they’d discontinue their use of AMEX. My company agreed. I paid off and discontinued the use of all of my AMEX cards and so did my company.
Then followed two years of AMEX calling my cellphone and trying to get me to pay. At first, I explained the situation and sent them letters. They didn’t care. They wanted me to pay.
So I told them I’d never pay and told them never to call my cellphone again. I wrote them a letter saying the same. For over a year, they continued harrassing me on my cellphone anyway. Each time I told them to never call me again, and I wrote them additional letters instructing them to not contact me again. They just kept calling.
Eventually, AMEX reported the $$ as unrecoverable on my credit report. It was a business card, but it wrecked my personal credit.
I’m now paying them off because they have the leverage – through credit reports – to force me to pay them.
AMEX has lost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in lifetime “skim off the top” money because neither I nor my employer will use them again.
And I caution anyone who reads this to carefully consider doing business with AMEX. I’ve never been treated like this by Visa or Mastercard banks. There have very rarely been issues, but there have been a couple of times over 30 years that an invoice or check has gotten lost in the mail or something was mailed to an old mailing address after a move. The handful of times it’s happened, they’ve graciously removed late fees or interest charges and we’ve moved on.
When I spoke to an attorney about my AMEX woes, they told me two things. First, this is typical AMEX. They don’t use AMEX and they tell their friends not to use AMEX. And second, my only recourse was to pay AMEX.
And that’s why neither I nor my company use AMEX. And I recommend that you don’t either.
Barry Races 