Consumer complaint received 2018-02-23
Company: CITIBANK, N.A.
State: TX
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Closing your account
Sub-issue: Can't close your account

Complaint:
I applied for a Citi credit card to use for reimbursable work purchases in XX/XX/XXXX, two days after applying I received a letter stating that my application had been approved and that I would receive the card in 7-10 business days. The letter had a phone number to call if I did not receive the card within this time frame. On XX/XX/XXXX, approx. 14 days after having received the letter, I had not received the card so I called the number. The person who answered transferred me to someone else who said that he couldn't help because he was responsible for new accounts and I have an existing account, so he transferred me to a repeating message that told me to call the number that I had called to begin with for personal cards or another number for corporate cards with no options to talk to anyone or leave a voicemail or anything. I attempted to call the number again with the same results. The third time I said that I needed to cancel the card and they transferred me to someone else who asked a lot of strange questions to " verify my identity, '' and none of the answers that I provided satisfied her even though they were factual responses to her questions. Her responses to my answers were disrespectful and she accused me multiple times of attempting to commit fraud over about 20 minutes of attempting to confirm my identity. The conversation ended with her telling me that she has to send a letter to my registered address to confirm my identity before anything can be done. A couple of hours later I checked my mail for the day and found a letter from Citi that stated that I had suspicious activity on the account that I had just applied for and not yet received a card for and that I needed to call about the suspicious activity. So I called again and was transferred to a more respectful person who paid attention to my questions and answered them appropriately instead of saying " mmmhmmm, that doesn't match what we have '' to everything and accusing me of trying to commit fraud. It took about 30 seconds to confirm my identity with this second person, we discussed the card having not yet arrived and the suspicious activity letter. She stated that the card should arrive any day now and that I should ignore the suspicious activity letter because it had been sent in error. On XX/XX/XXXX,  the card still had not arrived and I received another letter regarding suspicious activity on the account. I called again on XX/XX/XXXX and went through a few transfers before talking to someone who said that he could help with the situation. I gave him the information that I had and explained what was going on, he said that he needed to put me on hold and would be back shortly. After being on hold for 9 minutes the call disconnected. I called again and asked to cancel the card, was told that I needed to be transferred and was hung up on again.

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