Amex card referral bonuses are some of the best out there due to their high annual caps and the ability to refer to cards that you don’t have. However, the annoying thing is that Amex pools all of your Membership Rewards together across all of your cards. While this is usually pretty convenient, the drawback of this is that when you have multiple Amex cards and receive a referral bonus, Amex doesn’t tell you which card that referral bonus came from.
This makes it especially hard to keep track of how many referral bonuses a card has and whether it is at its referral limit or not. That was the case until recently when usccstrategy discovered a way to finally figure out which Amex card was used for the referral bonus!
Example Referral Bonuses
In your Amex account points summary page, referral bonuses aren’t explicitly labeled and instead will have a series of letters and numbers followed by the referral bonus amount and the word “BNS”. When you have multiple referral bonuses post to your account, they will all follow this format and will not tell you anywhere which card this bonus came from.
Previously, the best way to figure it out was based on the amount of points earned since each card could have its own unique referral bonus amount. The problem with this method was if both cards had the same referral bonus amount then it was impossible to know which card the referral came from.
How To Find Out Which Amex Card Was Used
But now, we have a surefire way to tell! Whenever you generate a referral link, paste the link into your internet browser, and wait for the entire link to load, it will look something like this.
https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/credit-cards/referral/prospect/personal/JAMESARzou?CORID=J~A~M~E~S~A~R~z~o~u-1705295857792-324534457&GENCODE=349993123973093&extlink=US-MGM-DEFAULT-copypaste-137-201279-K5SH%3A9972&v=1&xl=cp01
I’ve highlighted the important part of the URL because that’s the key to this trick. If we go back to our points summary page and look at the referral bonus, you’ll notice that the highlighted section of the URL matches the first 4 letters in the bonus description! If you had another card in your account, the unique 4 letter code in the generated referral link would not match the points summary entry for the referral bonus.
Conclusion
With this easy trick, you’ll never have to guess which card your referral bonus came from and can now accurately keep track of when your card is approaching its referral limit.
