Consumer complaint received 2023-04-06
Company: CITIZENS FINANCIAL GROUP, INC.
State: NY
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Closing your account
Sub-issue: Company closed your account

Complaint:
Citizens had closed my credit card ending in XXXX ( Citizens Cash Back Plus ) due to inactivity for 3 months, but I was planning to use it until I got this notice in the mail. Prior to the close, I never got any notice or warnings that my account was going to close due to inactivity. They closed the credit card on XX/XX/2023. 

I called immediately on XX/XX/2023 to see if I can recover the account. The phone representative transferred me to an account specialist, they said they will investigate and try to re-open account along with a hard inquiry which I agreed to do. I was told to call the following week to get an update. So I called on XX/XX/2023 to follow up. This time the account specialist claimed that there's no notes on me speaking to a past representative or other specialist so they had to try and re-open it again. They told me to follow up again on Thursday, XX/XX/2023. 

Today is XX/XX/2023. And I'm noticing the same pattern happening. Firstly, I spoke to a general credit card representative and he told me that my account got re-opened so I was initially excited, but then he noticed that my rewards ( {$45.00} in cash back ) was not available, so he transferred me to account specialist Account specialist ( this time her name was XXXX XXXX told me that there's no notes about any previous calls again. So what is going on here? Where's the data organization? Are these reps taking this seriously? Why are they not keeping notes of my previous calls and no status updates? This is getting ridiculous. I informed XXXX the specialist that I got a physical mail that my credit card closed, so she indicated that if I got this physical mail then there's no recovery of the credit card ( despite my 100 % on-time payments, low credit utilization and high credit score ). Of course this is not matching up with what the general rep told me previous. Why did he saw it was opened back up while the specialist has different answer? Something is not right here. Things are not matching up. 

So I asked XXXX, am I at least able to get back the {$45.00} in rewards reimbursed to me since I worked so hard to earn the cashback as a loyal customer? And she said " no '' because if the account is closed then its unrecoverable and the points with it are gone. 

I'm not sure why this credit card company gives me the most hardest time out of all credit card companies. But I think this should be investigated thoroughly because not only are their information inconsistent, but they are not making notes, being lazy, not doing their jobs and they do not respect customer loyalty ( although I shouldn't expect that ) but to close my credit card and not recover it immediately should be rectified by the company. Something is being overlooked so I wanted to bring this to light. 

I felt as if this company just stole my wasted time, effort and money that I earned legitimately with no repressions to their actions or to their own business ethics for customers.

Company response to consumer: Closed with monetary relief