I signed up for an American Express credit card which was advertising a $225 bonus upon signing up for the card and spending some $1200 in the first six months, which I did and received the cash reward. For the 4 other credit cards I have owned in the US over the last 8 years, I have never had an issue with AutoPay once. However, with this card, I had apparently got into trouble setting up Autopay on the website and got charged some $70 in late payment fees. I continued to find the AutoPay page confusing.
I called them to request to cancel this account mentioning what clearly seemed like a poorly designed AutoPay webpage, and I had only had this card for 7 months till then. The agent did not notify me on the call that if I would cancel then (less than 12 months of holding the card), I would have to pay them back the $225, and I later learned it's their policy to inform the customer in such cases who is looking to cancel an account. A few days later of course, I was made to pay back that cash award amount.
I called them back asking about this, and told them I was not well informed that I would lose this cash reward, otherwise I would not have requested to cancel the card then. They put me on hold for literally 50 minutes and came back saying they will investigate that first phone call where the agent did not properly inform me and then get back to me. No one got back to me over email which always I would have said is the preferred mode of communication, and then I called them again 3 weeks later and they again said they will investigate, after putting me on hold for 30 minutes. In the meantime they reopened the account. Two weeks later, I called them again, and they put me on hold for 20 minutes again, and finally told me they will not reimburse the statement credit.
I again wrote to them via chat asking to close this account for good, and then over chat got a perfunctory notice saying "Cancelling your account will result in your forfeiting any earned cash reward."
I understand there is probably no legal recourse since the fine print mentions the cash reward would be forfeited upon closing within a year and likely mentions nothing about the representatives having to give any warning over phone or chat, but is there any recourse for the wasting of time and the misleading customer service when I requested them to investigate and try to return the cash reward which they didn't even after reopening the account?