{"id":5653,"date":"2022-10-28T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-28T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/?p=5653"},"modified":"2023-04-18T11:18:11","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T17:18:11","slug":"an-american-express-development-cash-advances-on-merchants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/2022\/10\/28\/an-american-express-development-cash-advances-on-merchants\/","title":{"rendered":"An American Express Development: Cash Advances on Merchant Charges"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>UPDATE: MSN Flyer reports that American Express charged a cash advance on a purchase at vanillagift.com as well. The issue appears wider spread than we thought and is a troubling development.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>American Express is historically very forgiving with cash-like purchases, seeing a cash advance show up on a statement is effectively unheard of unless you visit an ATM, run a bank teller cash transaction, use it at a casino, or for a payday lender transaction. In fact, I\u2019ve never seen a cash advance on any of my American Express cards in my manufactured spend history, even when the merchant sells nothing but gift-cards or when buying literal currency from the US mint.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s something rotten in <s>Denmark<\/s> Manhattan though: There are now two reports of a cash advance fee being charged at a mostly under-the-radar Mastercard gift card online retailer when using an American Express. One of the reports from <a class=\"ek-link\" href=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/image-2.png\">includes a screenshot of the transactions<\/a>. (Many thanks to reader Nick)<\/p>\n<p>I haven\u2019t purchased gift cards from this retailer in several weeks so I don\u2019t have a datapoint of my own, but I can say that this retailer has been wonky with American Express for about two months. Some of its quirks:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Requires AmEx SafeKey, but only sometimes<\/li>\n<li>Orders occasionally pass SafeKey but then sends a failure to the retailer<\/li>\n<li>SafeKey tokens can leak to or from other sites<\/li>\n<li>Pending charges started appearing with a merchant name of \u201cOTH MISC\u201d or was blank, and the name only corrected when the charge actually posted.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Was the cash advance charge intentional on American Express\u2019s part? I\u2019m honestly not sure, I think it\u2019s equally likely that the vendor messed up their merchant account in some other way that caused the cash advance and it may be fixed in a few weeks. Also, recall that historically when American Express is sick of manufactured spend at a particular retailer they just stop awarding points but still let the transaction through rather than charging a cash advance fee, like with <a class=\"ek-link\" href=\"https:\/\/simon.com\/volume\">Simon.com<\/a> purchases, so it\u2019s an odd turn to blatantly charge cash advances on a similar retailer.<\/p>\n<p>Regardless of the cause, watch your American Express manufactured spend charges closely for the next couple of months until we get a better handle on what\u2019s up.<\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-block-image is-style-editorskit-rounded\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><img alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5657\" decoding=\"async\" sizes=\"(max-width: 980px) 100vw, 980px\" src=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/badplumbing.jpeg\" srcset=\"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/badplumbing.jpeg 980w, https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/badplumbing-300x200.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/badplumbing-768x513.jpeg 768w\" width=\"420\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\" style=\"font-size:14px\">The plumbing between a certain gift card vendor and their merchant processor. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>UPDATE: MSN Flyer reports that American Express charged a cash advance on a purchase at vanillagift.com as well. The issue appears wider spread than we<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_editorskit_title_hidden":false,"_editorskit_reading_time":1,"_editorskit_is_block_options_detached":false,"_editorskit_block_options_position":"{}","footnotes":""},"categories":[54,13,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-credit-cards","category-louse","category-whomp-whomp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5653"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6914,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5653\/revisions\/6914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesearnandburn.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}