Consumer complaint received 2024-09-09
Product: Credit card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem when making payments — Problem during payment process
Company: CITIBANK, N.A. (NH)

Soon after XX/XX/XXXX, I received my Citi Double Cash Card statement bearing that date. In combination with the Card Terms, it indicated that the statement balance of {$210.00} must be returned to the bank by XX/XX/XXXX to avoid penalties and interest. The bank got more than that full amount by the deadline, so the balance should have been considered completely paid off prior to the deadline, as is my typical history. Instead, the bank slapped me with a late fee and penalties and indicated likely loss of points through their rewards program as well as trailing interest and other negative consequences. 

Charges on the XX/XX/XXXX statement included a {$200.00} charge from XXXX. That charge was unethical by the merchant, discussed with the merchant after long delays in the merchants response and repeated follow-ups, and according to the XX/XX/XXXX statement was reversed on XX/XX/XXXX, leaving just {$17.00} owed from the XX/XX/XXXX statement. As reflected on the XX/XX/XXXX statement, I made a payment of {$13.00} on XX/XX/XXXX as well as XXXX payments of {$1.00} each on XXXX, XXXX, XX/XX/XXXX, XX/XX/XXXX, XX/XX/XXXX, XX/XX/XXXX, XX/XX/XXXX, XX/XX/XXXX, and XXXX, which should have brought my amount owing from the prior statement to $ XXXX, or $ XXXX if only counting amounts received before XXXX. 

In addition to paying off that balance entirely by the deadline, I also made {$340.00} in new purchases or donations with the card, as listed on my XX/XX/XXXX statement which reflects a due date of XX/XX/XXXX. Applying the {$5.00} in overpayments, I should have no interest or penalties related to those purchases so long as I pay {$330.00} by XX/XX/XXXX, which is still weeks in the future. 

The bank informed me of this past-due account status by a phone call, from a number marked as likely spam/scam on my phone. When I answered the call anyway, an automated system claimed to be calling about my Citi card asked me for personal identification data such as the billing ZIP code and last XXXX digits of my social security number ; reps later asked for additional information like my full name. This was nominally for identity protection and security purposes, but the effect of that is the opposite, training folks to be vulnerable to phishing scams. I did not answer the systems questions but listened as a representative provided some account activity information that only the bank should have ; I filled in additional details only after logging into the banks website and seeing the late charge / past-due status reflected there. After a while, the person who I had been connected to ( apparently in the collections department ) transferred me to someone else ( nominally but not actually a customer service supervisor ) who went back to the beginning asking personal information starting with full name. That got disconnected and when I tried to call back in to the number on the back of the card ( which was not the same as the one on spoofable caller ID from the first call ) I could only get connected to collections, who kept emphasizing the need to make a payment for money which I DONT currently owe. Im guessing they are compensated according to the amount of money they collect from people, regardless of the legality of the demand. This reps stories were pretty similar to the ones on the incoming call marked as spam, which I now believe was probably legitimately from the bank and terrible from the perspective of training people to be vulnerable to phishing. 

After a while I got the collections rep to say they would connect me to a customer service supervisor, who was actually a collections supervisor who gave her name as XXXX, applying the same payment pressure. We spent a while on the phone, in which she kept repeating things that had already been corrected ( e.g. using XXXX as the date of payments & credit because that was the date of the statement they were listed on ). Bank reps also regularly over-focused on the most recent {$1.00} payment as if that were the only payment made on a {$210.00} statement balance. 

It's worth noting here that this credit card advertises a 2 % cashback reward, but structures it so that 1 % is applied at the time of purchase and an additional 1 % at the time of payment if the purchase appeared on a statement before the payment. Prepayments do not yield the latter reward, and Ive lost a notable amount of the advertised benefit due to paying too early. ( The illogic of a credit card company penalizing customers for paying too soon is frustrating. ) The bank actively incentivizes customers waiting until a purchase is reflected on a statement BEFORE the customer should make any payment on that amount, and the payment on those amounts isnt due until at least 23 days after the statement closes. 

After a while, XXXX agreed to credit the late fee but insisted I still had to make a payment, because my account was past due, despite having gotten the prior months balance paid off in full before the due date. The account being in past-due status means that I can be hit with other fees, lose the rewards ( which are only available to customers whose account is current ), have residual interest fees assessed ( possibly at a penalty APR ), lose a promotional APR, and wind up with other negative impacts because of this past-due status affecting credit reports. She noted that neither she nor anybody else at the bank can do anything proactively to address these issues. She could not even retroactively address most of those consequences : only customer service can do that and only retroactively and ( like the claim others made ) I cant be connected to customer service because the call volume is high and wait times are long, and they cant wait on hold so long. I also cant call customer service because all my calls to the customer service number get rerouted straight to the collections department. Apparently my only option is to spend hours on the phone with the bank calling them up each month to go through an IVR ( phone menu ) maze, wait in a call queue to be connected to collections and go through the whole story, do it again with a collections supervisor, maybe get into a long call queue for customer service, go through the whole story from the start with a customer service agent who isnt empowered to address the issue, request a supervisor, wait in another call queue for that, and go through the story again, only to probably be told that sorry, nothing can be done because this is just the way our system works paying off a balance in full isnt enough to satisfy minimum payment requirements and the lines about a minimum payment being capped at the statement balance are simply not programmed into the computers so its the customers cost of having to pay extra penalties and interest while losing out on rewards. XXXX have to spend all that time and frustration, each month for as many months as they continue to charge trailing interest on trailing interest, over pretty small dollar amounts. 

Just for context, I currently have {$10000.00} in a savings account at that same bank earning just 0.03 % interest ( tiny compare to even just the differences between what other banks are advertising for competitive savings accounts ) and {$500.00} in a checking account not earning any interest at all. For the most part, that money has just been sitting there for years. I regularly pay off my full statement balance before the deadline every month and this was no exception. If the bank treats loyal, responsible customers this way, imagine how much worse they treat everybody else! CFPB should do some deep investigations there and require full compliance with consumer protection laws. 

I charge $ XXXX for consulting work in good times and have sunk 3 hours into this issue so far, and I dont think thatll be even half of the final total. Id be making a lot more if I could throw bogus fees and charges at huge numbers of customers on the grounds that economically rational self-focused individuals would just pay them without wasting more time its worth trying to get it fixed. The bank should not be allowed to do that. I should not have to spend this much time and effort when they got more than the full amount they asked for, before the due date.