Consumer complaint received 2021-03-09
Product: Debt collection — Credit card debt
Issue: False statements or representation — Attempted to collect wrong amount
Company: CITIBANK, N.A. (GA)

On XX/XX/XXXX I signed up for a service on an existing Citi card, offered by Citi Bank called a Citi Flex Plan. This is an offer to utilize unused credit balance as a fixed interest loan. I received a {$9900.00} sum on the terms of 6.99 % over 60 months, with a monthly payment of {$190.00}. 

One of the questions I had was readily answered. The question was " how to I pay my flex loan and my card payment separately since they're on the same card '' as I intended to continue as I have for the previous 5 years and pay off my balance at the beginning of every month. The answer seemed to be simple, on the payment tab, there's an option to pay balance + 1 month of Citi flex plan payment. This option goes on to clarify that this payment does not include any additional months payment. 

On the first payment I owed both a card payment and flex plan payment I selected this option and made my payment. This was XX/XX/XXXX. When I went to pay on XX/XX/XXXX I was shocked at the amount owed for my standard purchase account. 

I withheld payment at that time and exported my payment data to ensure no false charges were made to my account. After a significant amount of time accounting for all payments I still could not verify where this excess payment was coming from until I checked my flex plan balance. At my XX/XX/XXXX payment, instead of 1 month being deducted from that payment, 14 months were deducted. This means that an additional sum of over {$2000.00} in purchases were rolled over into the following month. 

When I spoke to the bank, they said that any payments over the statement amount will be payed to the flex plan, and that the charge can not be undone. The issue is that the payment option does NOT display statement balance + flex plan balance, it displays running balance + flex plan balance, which means if you choose that payment option after your statement has been issued, all additional payments after said statement that are stated to go to your purchase account instead go to your flex payment. I should note that by the time the actual cause of the issue was sorted out I had been on the phone for several hours and spoke with multiple customer service representatives. I was told by the last representative that they understood what I was saying and they would need to look into it and call back. I missed the call back and the number they gave me connected back to the main service line. I told this representative the situation and they stated there's no way to connect me to the previous representative or to see their interpretation of the issue and asked me to start over from the beginning at which point I decided to file a complaint instead. 

The main issue here, while seemingly innocuous being that my payment was still applied to an outstanding balance dollar for dollar, is actually quite devastating for my family. The reason we have this flex plan in the first place is to cover my Wife 's XXXX care after she no longer qualified for insurance through her job. We planned to spread treatment payments out over the flex plan loan term to hold us until she was able to get insurance through work again. Now we've lost the ability to draw {$2000.00} out of that flex loan as well as losing {$2000.00} out of our operating budget that went to paying the additional purchase account expenses. This is a blatant violation, of the fair debt collection practices act, as both the amount I owed and the accounts to which my payment would be applied to were misrepresented. 

I thought this would be a routing call for the bank, however multiple times customer service failed to see the issue. Citi customer service is essentially non-existent. I was continuously denied the opportunity to speak to anyone who had the authority to actually look into the issue, and when there was a potential solution, Citi 's own system made it impossible to follow up on.