This happened back in June, but I’m finally getting around to blogging about it. AMEX is usually pretty tolerant of cycling their CL’s and they’ll let you spend up to 2-3X of your CL before they start denying your charges. I had a Simplycash card that that a $5K CL. I got up to about 12K or so of charges and my statement closed. Since I get paper statements, I was able to see that they had changed my APR on the card because they did an Experian soft pull to see my lower score and my recent mishaps on my credit report.
We always knew banks like Chase would do soft pulls on you if your utilization got too high, but I never knew AMEX did too. At least AMEX doesn’t immediately axe you; they just crank up your APR.
