“Reward points are blocked due to commercial / business usage.”
Here’s the real reason it happens:
1. ICICI tracks unusual transaction patterns
ICICI monitors reward abuse. Your account gets flagged if you:
- Make many small transactions mainly to collect offers
- Use the card repeatedly on the same merchant
- Do high-volume transactions in a short time
- Share your card with friends/family who transact from different devices or locations
Even if you were not doing business, the
pattern looks like commercial activity to their system.
2. Reward block happens at the Customer ID level — not card level
This is the part most people misunderstand.
When ICICI flags commercial usage:
❌ They
do not block only one card
❌ They
do not unblock the reward points if you get a new card
✔️ They block the
entire reward engine linked to your Customer ID
That means:
- All your existing cards
- All future ICICI cards you get
→ will NOT earn reward points until ICICI manually removes the block.
So replacing the card, upgrading, or getting a new one
won’t fix the issue.
3. Why ICICI considers it a loss
If you generate a high amount of reward points quickly, ICICI sees it as:
- unsustainable for them financially
- not normal retail spending behaviour
So they classify it as “commercial usage,” even if you just gave your card to friends to make online purchases.