Consumer complaint received 2022-02-03
Company: CITIBANK, N.A.
State: FL
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem with a purchase shown on your statement
Sub-issue: Credit card company isn't resolving a dispute about a purchase on your statement

Complaint:
We have been experiencing an extremely alarming trend from our creditor Citi regarding mishandling of billings disputes and intentional evasiveness and non-responsiveness. 

Citi has failed to respond to numerous electronic communications regarding a recent dispute and their Billing Disputes department is clearly designed to be evasive and difficult to contact. 

The level of incompetence demonstrated by the investigators handling these cases is extremely alarming. Even more concerning, is the fact that there is no public record of the employees assigned to handling these cases so there is no accountability for their incompetence and our complaints regarding this matter are not being handled properly by the company internally. 

We strongly believe that a governing organization needs to investigate the mishandling of disputes and the evasive manor in which their department is structured. 

We recently opened a dispute with a merchant operating under the title of " XXXX XXXX XXXX '' as the merchant has failed to perform the paid services as advertised which ultimately resulted in damage to our property. 

Our attempts to resolve the matter with the merchant were unsuccessful so we opened a dispute with Citi. 

The case number provided for that dispute is # XXXX. 

The dispute was promptly closed claiming to have resolved the matter in the merchants favor and that the " customer was responsible ''. The reasoning for the abrupt closure of the dispute was because " the merchant had responded ''. 

Upon reviewing the response from the merchant they had provided nothing more than an invoice for the failed services. 

We immediately appealed this decision as it was apparent that there was no " investigation '' and that the creditor made no legitimate attempt to resolve the issue. 

The case was temporarily reopened and then abruptly closed with the reasoning being that " the merchant refuses to issue a credit ''. 

This response was very concerning as that was the underlying reason for initiating the dispute to begin with as we had been experiencing difficulty collecting reimbursement from the merchant. 

This official response from Citi implies that an irresponsible merchant is free to take advantage of it's customers without any accountability or appropriate action on behalf of Citi if the merchant simply " refuses to issue a credit ''. 

It was apparent that Citi was not willing to take appropriate action to dispute the matter with the merchants bank and was quick to take " no '' as an acceptable answer from the merchant which is extremely alarming. 

We suspect that there may be some financial affiliation between Citi and this merchant. 

We immediately appealed their outlandish " resolution '' and rejected the illogical reasoning provided by Citi who then responded stating " We are unable to dispute the matter with the merchant or their bank unless a credit slip is provided ''. 

This is completely counterintuitive to why the disputes process was developed and the entire reasoning for initiating the dispute with our creditor was due to the fact that the merchant was not cooperative with our attempts to obtain a full refund resulting from the damage to our property. 

We sent Citi a notification of our appeal to their decision based on the spurious reasoning for refusing to dispute the matter but they have intentionally failed to acknowledge or respond to our correspondence. 

Citi only provided us with a single initial response from the merchant yet they claimed to have contacted the merchant multiple times. 

We requested that Citi provide us with all responses from the merchant and any communications between the two parties but that request has also been ignored by Citi. 

It's apparent that this evasiveness and non-responsiveness is intentional which is why we are reaching out to you for your assistance to resolve the following two matters.

1. ) Acquire a full refund from the merchant for the inadequate services 2. ) Investigate the mishandling of disputes and intentional evasiveness demonstrated by Citi We own over 14 credit cards and are very familiar with the disputes process and how other creditors handle disputes so we are very concerned about how Citi has been handling disputes. We were formerly a long-time customer of Citi spending in excess of $ XXXX annually across multiple Citi accounts but the mishandling of two of our recent disputes is so concerning that we have completely suspended doing business with that creditor as they apparently choose to operate their company with blatant disregard to consumer protection law. 

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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 non-monetary relief