by mt_xing
In short, I just got my extended warranty claim for my smart watch denied because I charged to my card a bundle consisting of my phone and watch, and therefore Amex says the watch itself was not charged to my card.
The longer version is that I bought a new phone and smart watch last year during a promotion when the retailer had aggressively discounted the price of the bundle including both the phone and the watch. I charged the entire price of the bundle to my Amex Green.
The tap-to-pay NFC feature on my watch broke a few weeks ago. I got in contact with the manufacturer and got them to certify for me, in writing, that this would have been covered under the one year warranty, except for the fact that the watch broke a few months after the warranty had expired. They quoted a warranty replacement price of $289 USD.
This felt like the simplest extended warranty case ever, so I sent it all to Amex. And then they denied the claim, saying the watch was not charged to an eligible card.
I called in and the very nice representative managed to get my actual claims examiner on the line to explain the denial to me. They said that the discount on the bundle means I got the watch for free and it’s not covered. Specifically, they took the difference between the sum of the MSRPs of the phone and watch versus the bundle price and said that the discount is large enough that if you apply the full discount to the MSRP of the watch, then I got the watch for free and so they only cover the phone.
This is not how I understand retail bundles to work, but no matter what I asked or said, the examiner just repeated the exact same sentence “the watch was free so it was not charged to an eligible card” as if they were reading from a script.
I pointed out that the receipt itself clearly shows the discounted price taken off from the full price of the cart, not any specific item. I also even used the Wayback Machine to pull out the original terms and conditions of the retailer’s promotion and showed them the original bundle deal. The examiner just repeated the same script back at me again. I asked if there was any way to get another set of eyes on the claim and they said they could call their manager but they’d say the same thing to me.
I thanked them for their time and hung up. At this point I’m filing a CFPB complaint because the nearest small claims court where Amex is in the jurisdiction is five hours away from me.
In conclusion, when I got my first Amex almost two years ago, I had seen tons and tons of posts from sponsored blogs and also reddit comments about how great Amex’s customer support is. Over the last two years, every single interaction I’ve had with this company has been so terrible as to be borderline fradulent. Even earlier this week I saw a post on here about someone having trouble with their extended warranty with a different bank and then, out of the blue, an unsolicited comment is there not answering OP’s question at all but proudly proclaiming how Amex’s extended warranty would always take their customer’s side.
So be safe out there. Turns out the multi-billion-dollar-company is not actually your friend.
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