Consumer complaint received 2021-01-02
Company: CITIBANK, N.A.
State: VA
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem when making payments
Sub-issue: Problem during payment process

Complaint:
My wife and I have been credit card customers of Citi for over 15 years. We have nearly perfect credit and have never missed or been late with a payment in our time with Citi, and have always paid our balance in full. 

On XX/XX/XXXX, I mailed a check with the full statement balance as a payment, due on XX/XX/XXXX - exactly the same as I do for every other monthly payment, one full week in advance of the due date. However, Citi did not process the payment until 3 days after the due date. Citi further marked my account as having been " delinquent, '' and charged late fees as a result. Citi did not attempt to contact me, either via email or phone, at any time to tell me about this issue. On XX/XX/XXXX, Citi then declined a recurring payment because they claimed my account was delinquent, even though I am still well below my credit limit - again without contacting me to inform me. This resulted in me being late in my monthly payment to another vendor. 

I called to complain on two separate occasions. On the first occasion, Citi put in a request to waive the late fee. On the second call, Citi told me they had already removed the late fee, but they claimed they had no way to remove the " delinquent '' status, since they hadn't processed the payment before the due date ( even though the delay was not our fault ). Citi also told me that they will report my account as delinquent to the credit bureaus, even though they have already since processed the payment for the full account balance from my last statement. 

During this second complaint call, Citi made several fraudulent claims. They first claimed that we didn't mail the payment out on time. When we told them we could prove it was mailed on the XXXX, they then blamed the post office for delayed delivery and claimed they didn't receive the check until after the due date. When asked why we weren't notified, Citi claimed that they could not notify us about our payment not being processed on time because we were on a " do-not-call '' list, even though we had opted out of being contacted exclusively for marketing purposes only. Further, we regularly receive automatic emails from Citi telling us our statement is available online, and have received calls and emails about other account status changes as well. 

Citi claimed that they were following their standard banking policy by putting our account in " delinquent '' status, even if our payment was only one day late through no fault of our own. When my wife, who is a banking executive, pressed the Citi customer service supervisor on which " standard '' banking policy she was referring to, the supervisor then said it was Citi 's bank policy to do this, and that we were " wasting our time '' to argue with her any further. It was clear that Citi 's " bank policy '' was designed to use the convenient excuse of delayed post office deliveries during a pandemic ( and during the holidays ) as a predatory mechanism to charge extra fees from their customers without notifying them, and it was only by chance that we discovered this. 

I told Citi during this call I would be filing complaints to all of the appropriate regulators. Two days after saying this, we got a letter delivered via XXXX overnight mail ( not their normal mail delivery method ), where Citi claimed that I had requested to not be contacted for any reason, including for late payments. We have never made such a request - in fact, we had just requested the exact opposite from Citi.

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