American Express used to offer the ability to refer anyone you gave your own personal referral or recommendation link to a range of their products – earning you bonus points in the process. The best bonuses to be found were in the Membership Rewards card range.

You needed to hold a card of the same ‘currency’ as the one you were recommending – so a Qantas American Express would only be able to earn referral points for Qantas branded cards, and likewise for Virgin and Membership Rewards cards.

It has been a great way to earn some top up points for people in the know, who others turned to advice – you could send them off to apply for a product you recommended, with your referral link, and often with a higher bonus for the applicant than otherwise publicly available AND some bonus points in your pocket too.

Quite a few people recently have emailed me or commented noticing that I’ve pulled some of the American Express card offers down over the last week or so – these were run through the referral scheme which was taken offline for ‘maintenance’ a couple of weeks back. I was waiting to see if it returned – which it hasn’t – although Amex are convinced through their customer service channels and social media that it should be back up ‘within a month’.

I don’t have any other insights to this action by Amex and why they may have taken it, but I felt it was worth giving you a heads up on the removal of the program for the immediate future, and the lack of offers now available through my referral.

Hopefully it will come back with a bang in a month and with an updated range of offers and products available – OR the program is going to fade into oblivion. Obviously I hope the former, but am prepared for the latter.

Featured image by: Images Money

American Express temporarily remove the opportunity to refer people for cards and earn bonus points was last modified: June 24th, 2014 by Keith