AT&T Amex Offer Success
American Express seems to have come back strong recently with some good money-saving Amex Offers, including one to save 10% off your cable bill and various other travel discounts.
But occasionally Amex Offers aren’t what they appear on the surface. Such is the case with a current targeted offer for AT&T Wireless. While the offer is for $50 off $150, and usable up to three times per targeted card, it appears to be intended for Small Business customers. The offer has been found on mostly business cards, but there have been some reports of it showing up on personal cards too. I personally had it on both my primary and authorized user versions of the SPG Business card and my primary Business Green card (but not AU). The offer was only available to be loaded via American Express online accounts, not via social media.
Working on Consumer and Business Accounts
As previously reported by Doctor of Credit and Mommy Points, this offer is being triggered even by online payments to normal postpaid consumer AT&T accounts. I have personally confirmed, as recently as a few days ago, that this offer is still working on consumer accounts. This was also my second time making payments and getting the offer, so it appears that it will work up to the stated three-time usage. My $150 online payments triggered the usual immediate email confirmation for using the offer, and took three and five days to post to my account.
In my experience, as well as reading others, AT&T will allow payments beyond what is currently due – resulting in a credit balance. The Amex offer is set to expire on December 1st, so even if your bill doesn’t add up to $150 x 3 (times how many ever cards you have this offer on), you should be able to effectively prepay your account. But as a word of caution, given that this offer appears to be targeted for small businesses, it is a bit of a risky or your mileage may vary situation for consumer accounts (as the consumer account trigger of the deal could potentially go away).
Your Experience?
One key detail that I cannot confirm at the moment is whether or not this offer is still available to be loaded onto accounts*? If you find that it’s still available (or not), please let us know in the comments. Also, let us know what Amex cards you found this on, as well as any experience you’ve had with building up a (large?) AT&T credit balance.
*Update: Per the first couple comments (below), it appears that this offer is still available to be loaded on targeted accounts.
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[…] has been known for great Amex Offers in the past, but they have really outdone themselves this time. I previously have saved hundreds of dollars […]
Any datapoint on AT&T prepaid account? I don’thave a postpaid acct and don’t have contract with them.
I got the offer on a mix of personal and business. When the offer first showed up, I checked all cards and had it on 3, a Business Gold, a personal Gold, and an AU Gold. Last week I was checking for new offers, and the offer had shown up on 2 more cards. It must not have all been rolled out at the same time. It was on another AU personal Gold and on an AU personal SPG. The primary SPG did not get the offer. I had not paid ATT bill with any of these cards, so it appears to be completely random.
In response to the question….. “For anyone who has combined their AT&T Wireless and Directv bills, it would be interesting to know if it works for paying the combined bill?”……..I can confirm that it worked on my combined bill twice already. I just did a third payment yesterday and immediately got the email so I expect that I will be 3/3
Also interesting glitch.
Payment #1 for $150 went through fine, got email.
Payment #2 for $150 gave eror, said couldn’t have 2 transactions of same amount in 24 hours. OK fine, so I changed it to $150.01, that went through fine, got the email.
Payment #3 tried $150.02, got this preplexing error:
“The payment amount you have entered is greater than the maximum amount allowed.
(PM08B)”
That’s interesting. Perhaps spread the payments out by a few days or weeks will do the trick. Or perhaps you’ve pushed up against a maximum amount for a credit balance (or number of payments on top of a credit balance).
Doubt an AT&T credit balance max is the case. I had a $2,500 credit balance last year when I loaded up via the Discover Apple Pay deal.
I got the same error. Did you find a work around? I only have $222 credit and throttled 🙁
I played around with it and it would let me pay up to $300 credit. So there seems to be a $300 hard cap limit now at least in a combined UVerse and voice account.
Wow, Vicente! I’m sure that was a pleasant surprise.
I used to have AT&T Wireless, and when I added U-Verse I linked them.
I still have the U-Verse as my internet service, but long ago cancelled AT&T Wireless.
Interestingly, when I tried a $150 payment to AT&T, I got the immediate
“thank you” for using the offer.
I speculate that my account is still “homed” with Wireless and that
is why this works. Anyhow, a welcome loophole.
Thanks!
A few data points:
– I have it on 5 cards, all Amex SPG Business Cards
– I have run it twice on each of the 5 cards, and have received the bonus for all of them
– I have noticed a very odd delay in processing the $50 “offer”
I ran each card through at the same time for my first round of tests. My primary card triggered the “you just used your offer” email, which gave me some relief. However, many of the other cards did not trigger that email. Additionally, when I logged into my account, the $50 credit was not showing up in my “pending activity”. It took nearly a week for the credit to show up and I only know that because of the date on the posting – because I had long-since given up on checking my account every morning to see if the credit had posted and written it off as an inconvenience but “it was worth a shot”. I only discovered the credit had posted when I was paying my bill and noticed unexpected credits.
ALL of this felt very different from previous Amex Offers. Whether they have changed their process, or they changed their process for this one deal, or it was always like this and somehow I imagined the way I “thought” the process went before I can’t be certain – but I thought I would share my perspective in case it applies to anybody else.
I have since run them all through a second time a couple weeks ago, with the exact same process and results – though I didn’t give up so quickly or wait so long before checking back in to confirm the credits posted 🙂
Thanks, RG & Jeff.
Jeff – I think getting the email confirmation right away is pretty normal, but not all the time in my experience. As you’ll see in the post, the credits took 3 days to hit my online account on my second run. The first time it took 5 days. I don’t know if it’s just a bit random or if weekends are coming into play. But I also don’t think I’ve ever noticed the Offer credit showing up as “pending”. The original charge, yes, but the Offer credit typically just appears after a few days. If the credit never comes, you can always ask for it (via chat is probably easiest – and I’ve had success with that in the past), although it might be a bit problematic this time if you use it on a non-business account.
Got it on my personal AMEX Premier Rewards Gold,
Not showing up on our AMEX SimplyCash Plus business card, but then again, NONE of the target offers mentioned here and on other blogs have NOT shown up. Maybe we earn too much cash back already, $500+ per quarter?
Thanks, John. I did not get it on my SimplyCash biz card either. It is sometimes difficult (impossible?) to figure out why certain cards are targeted or not. I could understand if only biz cards got this offer, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
Didn’t work for my landline payment.
Thanks for the data point. Think this is just working with AT&T Wireless accounts. For anyone who has combined their AT&T Wireless and Directv bills, it would be interesting to know if it works for paying the combined bill.
John, it worked for me last week. I only have landline with ATT for faxing purposes. My bill is only around $22/mo.
Did your transaction look like the screenshot above from AT&T Bill Payment 971 – Dallas, TX?
Yes.
I got the offer on my Amex Plat Biz card…….i added the offer to my card, then i prepaid $160 on my ATT account, and immediaely received an email from AMEX letting me know to expect a $50 credit
Great!
I have it on my EveryDay Preferred and my authorized user’s card. Great, I’ll try to prepaid and see what happens.
Thanks, TAB. I don’t think there’s a business version of the Everyday cards, so that’s another good data point.
Hope the offer works for you as well as it has for me.
I still have it available to load on both my SPG Business and Business Gold Rewards cards and my wife has it on her SPG Business AU card. It showed up on them a month ago or so but I never loaded it as I don’t have AT&T service.
We have loads of other personal AMEX cards but it wasn’t on any of them, so I’m assuming they’ve targeted the biz cards as it’s (meant to be) for AT&T small biz customers.
Thanks for the data points, Stephen. Good to know that it is still available to be loaded on targeted accounts. I will update the post.
FYI – I have seen mention of this being available on some personal (non-business) cards, even though that is not my personal experience.