We’ve been seeing [targeted] heightened 20,000 Membership Reward “Blue Star” referrals come and go on Amex Business Platinum and Personal Gold cards. Right now they seem to be “in season” with a high percentage of these cards showing heightened referral bonuses.

Update: Others are reporting seeing this one Personal Platinum and Business Gold as well.

In this write-up and Milenomics Short Cut podcast episode, we’ll cover how how to maximize this referral opportunity.

If you’re new to Amex referrals, have a look this post:

Generating and Using an Amex Referral

To check whether you’re targeted, go here and click through each of your cards especially the Business Platinum and Personal Gold cards:

americanexpress.com/refer

Here are the topics we went over:

Don’t think you’re limited to referring for just these two cards. With Amex universal referral, your friend can sign up for a wide variety of Amex Membership Reward cards, plus co-branded cards like Hilton and Delta.

Regardless of which card your friend signs up for, the referral bonus is based on the card you refer from. That’s pretty unusual if you think about it. Amex has high signup bonuses for their flagship cards with high annual fees. But referrals are based on which card you refer from. This means your friend can sign up for a lowly no annual fee card, and you can still get 20,000 Membership Rewards if the card you’re referring from has been targeted.

Some people are targeted and some are not. Some cards are targeted and some are not. You can have two of the exact same card and you may see one targeted with 20,000 point referral capacity and the other card remains at 10,000 points. It even varies from day to day. If you see this offer, you may want to pounce on it. But you don’t necessarily need to use it immediately. More on that below. They can be “squirreled away.”

We’ve heard that some people are temporarily blocked from generating Amex referrals. We call this a “penalty box” which is usually a timeout that heals itself after time, but it’s unclear what causes it and how to get out of it.

“Going incognito” to see better offers (or at least different offers) is definitely a thing. Amex is notorious for displaying different welcome bonuses depending on how “come at them.”

Take for example the 40,000 point welcome bonus associated with the Amex Personal Gold card in the image at the top of this post. When I click through that referral link I sometimes see 40,000 and other times I see 50,000.

First, compare notes with others on what the best current bonus is for a given card. Then try to get that offer to come up. You can check desktop or mobile. Chrome or Firefox. Try going incognito/private. Try connecting to a VPN in another part of the country. Any of these can cause the welcome bonus to change. Crazy, right?

It stinks when a bank makes a referral offer worse than a public offer. It happens from time to time, but I don’t think it’s necessarily malice on their part. Offers through various channels just vary, or in some cases lag one another.

For example, we recentl