Consumer complaint received 2020-04-12
Company: CITIBANK, N.A.
State: PA
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Other features, terms, or problems
Sub-issue: Other problem

Complaint:
Headnote : I wish to emphasize at the outset that I am submitting a formal complaint to CFPB because Citi has not addressed my specific complaint at all in their replies to the submissions I have made directly to them. They instead change the subject stated in my complaint, while evading my actual complaint. Through this headnote I wish to put Citi on notice that a reply that fails to respond meaningfully to my actual complaint is simply non-responsive, and hereby request that CFPB consider it so. 

Executive Summary : As explained further in the sections below, Citi undermined my dispute with a merchant by deliberately filing that dispute with MasterCard  ( or MasterCard  's designated decider ) too late, even though warned by me in my original statement of dispute that they needed to file the dispute quickly in order to meet MasterCard  's deadline of 120 days from the date of the original transaction, i.e. by XX/XX/XXXX. 

As an analogy, this deadline is comparable to a statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit. No matter how strong the merits of your case, if you file it after the deadline, the court will not accept it. Accordingly, the subject of my complaint is Citi 's mishandling of the dispute that I had originally submitted to them, which Citi did not file until long after the deadline had passed. Citi 's failure to file the dispute in a timely manner pre-ordained a negative result. 

Background : On Friday, XX/XX/XXXX, a dispute arose with a merchant in regard to a transaction made on XX/XX/XXXX using my Citi MasterCard. On XX/XX/XXXX, I overnighted a detailed statement of this dispute ( see Exhibit 1 ) to Citi, which was received the following morning, requesting that they file a chargeback with MasterCard. Based upon my research in the MasterCard Chargeback Guide, I provided Citi with the specific chargeback applicable to this situation under MasterCard rules, explained in detail how my dispute satisfied the requirements for that chargeback, and appended the pages from the MasterCard Chargeback Guide that cover the applicable chargeback. The statement heavily emphasized that, under MasterCard rules, the chargeback might have to be filed by XX/XX/XXXX which was 120 days after the transaction date. 

The Present Complaint : As recounted in my letter to Citi dated XX/XX/XXXX ( see Exhibit 2, p. 7-9 ), Citi promptly processed my statement of dispute, crediting my account for the disputed amount ( {$2900.00} ) on XX/XX/XXXX. Citi did file the specific chargeback that I had suggested ( as described in the previous section ) with MasterCard or MasterCard 's designated decider, a company called XXXX, XXXX. However Citi did not do so in the timely manner urged in my statement of dispute and required by the MasterCard Chargeback Guidelines with which Citi is obligated to comply. Instead, Citi waited 20 days to file, until long after the deadline I had warned them about had passed. XXXX XXXX  decision letter ( see Exhibit 2, p. 2-6 ) rejected the chargeback as " Invalid Chargeback '' / " Late dispute '' and explained that they received the chargeback from Citi 134 days after the transaction date ( on XX/XX/XXXX ), whereas according to the excerpts from the MasterCard Chargeback Guidelines that I had sent to Citi, the applicable chargeback can not be made more than 120 days after the transaction date. Thus the 120 day deadline was the deciding factor. 

Citi made it inevitable that the chargeback would be rejected by filing it with MasterCard/XXXX too late. On the basis of that rejection, Citi subsequently reversed the credit for the disputed transaction ( in the amount of {$2900.00} ) that it had initially applied to my account on XX/XX/XXXX. Citi 's letter of XX/XX/XXXX ( see Exhibit 2, p. 1-6 ) notified me of the rejection and the reversal of the credit to my account, and also contained the decision letter from XXXX noted above. The letter requested that if I " still wish to dispute this charge, please specifically address the merchant 's response along with complete details of your dispute. '' My letter to Citi dated XX/XX/XXXX complained about Citi 's mishandling of the chargeback, pointing out that the chargeback Citi filed on my behalf was invalid on its face because Citi filed it too late, which made the information Citi requested about the original dispute irrelevant at that point. It was too late to resolve the original dispute with the merchant through MasterCard 's dispute resolution process because Cit had missed the applicable filing deadline. On XX/XX/XXXX ( see Exhibit 2, p. 10 ) Citi wrote to me announcing that they considered their investigation into my dispute to be complete because I had not specifically addressed the merchant 's response to the dispute, as requested in their letter of XX/XX/XXXX. This letter completely evaded the real issue which ( as stated in my XX/XX/XXXX letter ) was that Citi was responsible for the disputed amount because they had deliberately missed the deadline for filing the applicable chargeback with MasterCard. No additional information about the original dispute, however damning, could change that fact. 

On or about XX/XX/XXXX I called Citi customer service, explaining that the reason stated in Citi 's XX/XX/XXXX letter for terminating the dispute was unresponsive to my XX/XX/XXXX letter to Citi. Any additional information concerning the merchant 's egregious conduct would be pointless, since it would not supersede the deadline of 120 days which Citi had deliberately failed to meet. I pointed out that it was no longer a dispute between myself and the merchant because of Cit 's deliberate delay in filing the chargeback with the relevant MasterCard authority, but had now become a dispute between Citi and myself. As a result of this call to customer service, Citi reopened my dispute. 

Citi then sent me a letter dated XX/XX/XXXX ( see Exhibit 2, p.11 ) that simply reiterated the fact that the window of opportunity for resolving the original dispute had closed, stating " We no longer have any recourse to obtain credit for you since the timeframe, in which to resolve a dispute has passed. '' Citi 's letter did not address their mishandling of the original dispute, which was the entire point of my XX/XX/XXXX letter. Citi was again evading the real issue by falling back upon the original dispute resolution process even though the window of opportunity for pursuing that process had closed almost 3 months earlier on XX/XX/XXXX, the critical date that I had warned them about in my XX/XX/XXXX statement of dispute. 

Since Citi knowingly submitted the chargeback to MasterCard/XXXX 2 weeks after the XX/XX/XXXX deadline, thus dooming it from the start, Citi is responsible for MasterCard/XXXX XXXX  rejection of the chargeback. Citi has not addressed their mishandling of the chargeback in any of their communications with me. Accordingly, Citi 's late filing of the chargeback, 20 days after receiving my statement of the merchant dispute, is the subject of the present complaint.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation