Consumer complaint received 2021-05-12
Company: CITIZENS FINANCIAL GROUP, INC.
State: NH
Product: Checking or savings account
Sub-product: Checking account
Issue: Problem caused by your funds being low
Sub-issue: Late or other fees

Complaint:
To Whom it may concern : Hello, it was suggested I contact this bureau about a recent issue my wife and I had with Citizens bank. I also have contacted XXXX XXXX office about this matter. 

My wife co-signed on our son 's Student Loan with XXXX, and it turns out he had not been paying his monthly payment for a while. He thought money wasnt coming out anymore due to Covid. The bank had sent the account to a law office, who said they tried to contact him about it, and sent a letter, which we can not find ... the only phone messages we had were so generic they sounded like they could easily be a fraud call. My son received no e-mails from the bank about the past due account, neither did my wife. The bank did an offset, but not for only what he was behind XXXX approx. {$2400.00} XXXX they took an offset amount of everything we had in our checking accounts, a total of {$14000.00} ... leaving us {$50.00} in each of our checking accounts ( 2 ). When we called to work this out, get the account current / have our son reset up his payments ... they said there is nothing they can do to return what they took ... even though it is all internal to Citizens Bank. 

After speaking with 3 agents, they said they escalated to the Office of the Chairman, their highest level they would contact us within 10 days. Meanwhile we had an extraordinarily little amount of money left in our accounts. We did receive a letter in the mail from Citizens Bank on Monday XX/XX/26 ( over a week after they took the money from our accounts ) informing us that they did the right of offset. I also called my local bank on Monday the XXXX ; they could see that someone was assigned to our case, and we should receive a call soon now that someone was assigned. I called the local bank back on Thursday, the XXXX, as we had still not been contacted yet from that department. I spoke with the local bank manager, and he was going to see what he could find out. I called again on XXXX, and spoke with the local bank manager again, he was going to reach out to that dept again to see if he could get them to call me. It has now been over 3 weeks, and still no call or contact from the Office of the Chairman. 

To compound this issue with XXXX, we just recently XXXX XX/XX/XXXX ) had major fraud happen with our Citizens bank account. We received a call on a Friday afternoon XXXX XX/XX/XXXX ) from a number on our Caller ID that is the XXXX main number / ID, saying they saw fraudulent activity on our account. They asked if we had made some recent purchases, that we did not, and they asked all the 'right ' questions for someone who already had access to our account. This has happened to use before. They said they would remove the charges and send out a new debit card. When I checked my bank account online on Monday, I found that we had a negative {$5000.00} balance, and many new accounts ( 30+ ) had been opened in my name and money had been moved around and spent at XXXX at a time on XXXX gift cards. 

I had to call XXXX to report it, I never received a call over the weekend from XXXX saying they were seeing all this activity happen on my account, No Fraud Notification of actual fraud happening. We worked with them for over a week and a half on this, and they did finally untangle most of it / recovered our money. We did also file a police report and freeze our credit with the various credit bureaus. 

During all the work on fixing our accounts due to the fraud, the bank never told us about the past due Student Loan that was also in my wife 's name. If they had let us know then, we could have brought it up to date when all this was happening ... not having the offset occur at all. We also have a car loan and credit card with XXXX, which have all been paid on time since we have had each of those. We also check our credit reports regularly, and there are no items showing she has an account past due. 

I contacted XXXX XXXX office hoping they could help with getting a fair assessment from the bank on what was past due for the offset to bring the account current XXXX {$2400.00} XXXX. We are not expecting back the full {$14000.00}, just the difference, {$12000.00}. 

The fact that we have been a customer with Citizens Bank for over a decade, having multiple other accounts that have been kept up to date, and allowing that level of fraud occur on our accounts without any notification that it was occurring, prompting a deep review of our accounts to fix it, not notifying us about 1 account my wife was co-signed on that was behind, and then to take {$14000.00} from our accounts leaving us basically broke ... adds up to some very bad business practices for a bank that is supposed to be protecting your money.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation