Several Chase Ink cardholders, including myself, received an email recently that, at first glance, appeared completely routine. The account details matched those of my Ink Business Cash card, and the message resembled one of those harmless promotional emails banks often send.
It mostly talked about earning points through the Chase Shopping portal and reminded me that I could add employee cards at no extra cost. In other words, nothing unusual — just a standard engagement message.
I initially ignored it, but others took a closer look and noticed something strange buried near the bottom.
None of This Matches Any Chase Ink Card
The bonus categories listed in the email — 3% at restaurants, gas stations, and home improvement stores — immediately stood out. They don’t match any of the Chase Ink cards currently on the market.
The Ink Business Unlimited and Ink Business Premier are flat-rate cards with no bonus categories. The Ink Business Preferred earns Ultimate Rewards points and has its own set of travel and business-oriented categories. And my Ink Business Cash? That one’s supposed to earn 5% at office supply stores and on internet, cable, and phone services.
Even stranger, Chase doesn’t offer any card — business or personal — with 3% back at home improvement stores as a permanent feature. The closest match might be the Freedom Unlimited, which offers 3% on dining and drugstores, but not gas or hardware.
Naturally, I went to the fine print at the bottom of the email and clicked the link to the terms and conditions. That led me to my account’s reward breakdown — and sure enough, nothing had changed. My account still showed the expected 5% categories for the Ink Business Cash.
That only made the email more confusing.
So what card were these categories even for?
Reddit Solves the Mystery
After plenty of confusion and speculation, someone over on Reddit finally cracked the case — and it turns out this wasn’t a warning about future changes or a misfire with my account. It was just a marketing template for a different, little-known Ink variant.
As it turns out, the bonus categories in the email — 3% at restaurants, gas stations, and home improvement stores — match an older version of the “Ink Cash” card that Chase offered years ago. As far back as 2017, that version of the card featured exactly those categories before Chase rebranded it and updated the benefits.
You can still find mentions of that older version on forums like this Reddit thread, where longtime cardholders recalled those now-retired perks.
Even Chase Got Confused by Its Own Cards
What likely happened here is less about outdated materials and more about Chase mixing up its messaging between two similarly named — but technically different — products. While the current version is the “Ink Business Cash,” some cardholders still have the older “Ink Cash” card, which features now-discontinued 3% bonus categories. And yes, banks still have to send communications to holders of these “dinosaur” cards, even if they’ve been off the market for years.
That would explain why Chase still maintains updated-looking graphics for a card it no longer issues — they’re not necessarily old, just intended for a very specific (and shrinking) group of legacy customers. Unfortunately, it appears that someone accidentally included those visuals in a broader marketing email and sent it to a much wider audience.
As I mentioned in this post about discontinued credit cards, legacy cards don’t just vanish, and issuers still have to support them. But it’s a little unnerving when even the bank seems to confuse one version of a product with another.
This seems to have been a simple mistake, but as of this writing, I haven’t received any correction or “oops” email from Chase. So if you were wondering whether your Ink card’s rewards had changed overnight, the good news is: they haven’t. The bad news? You might know more about your card than Chase’s marketing department does.
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