Sign up bonus and mistaken identity

[trueneutral]

I have recently signed up for the Amex platinum during the offer period and found it odd that the usual “spend tracker” for the welcome bonus is not there when logging in to my account. I queried with Amex and was told that I have another active MR card and am not eligible for the bonus. I certainly didn’t have one and after querying further it appears to be a card held by a family member who lives with me.

Still trying to resolve it with Amex at the moment but am wondering if anyone else encountered a similar issue before and how best to get this clarified?

[NorthernLass]

DO you have the same name or very close with the family member? This might be why the confusion has been caused. You’ll probably have a long job ahead of you showing that you’ve got different dates of birth (I guess) and other factors which show you’re two different people.

[Rui N.]

Glad that the missing tracker prompted you to look into this and find this issue.
But in fact there is nothing odd at all of not having the tracker. It comes and goes as it pleases.

[trueneutral]

Yes our names look similar but not identical. I guess this shows that there is a manual process by a human to determine welcome bonus eligibility as an algorithm should have picked up different names.

All of our other details (apart from similar name and identical address) including DOB are different, so hopefully amex see the their mistake. Have “escalated” it and I’ll update when I get a resolution.

[trueneutral]

Managed to get to the bottom of this – what happened was that there is a tranche of platinum customers whose welcome bonus is delayed due to IT issues and I am one of them. When I enquired about the delay via chat, the chat staff looked up the cards that are active in my address, noticed a gold card under a name similar to mine, and wrongly informed me that I am not eligible for a welcome bonus as I am holding an active card. There was never another card from my family that was associated with my profile.

I have now received the welcome bonus, 1 month after I hit the spend target.

I guess this is an interesting datapoint on how amex attempts to identify the same natural person when checking welcome bonus eligibility.