Consumer complaint received 2023-08-02
Product: Credit card or prepaid card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Trouble using your card — Can't use card to make purchases
Company: CITIBANK, N.A. (AZ)

Hello. I have a credit card with Citibank -- it's an AA Advantage card. I have used it for years as my primary card spending anywhere from $ XXXX a month to $ XXXX a month. I like the card as it accrues me miles, has a high limit, and great features. 

In the past, there have been fraud warning that were tripped for various reasons : maybe an item of clothing that seemed weird, maybe a strangely large purchase -- all valid, and while annoying in the moment, all were easy to avoid. They would send me a text message asking if it was a valid purchase, I would type Y into the chat, and it would be approved. Easy, no fuss. 

3 weeks ago, the night before I was heading to fly to XXXX on a 2 week vacation, I tried purchasing a XXXX pass for the country of XXXX. During the 2 step verification process I fumbled the 2FA on my keypad, and messed up a few times : I am human afterall, and mistakes happen. 

The fraud protection got tripped, and my card stopped working. But what started was a bizarre next 3 weeks. 

That night I tried calling to clear the fraud warning, but the call was odd. The fact I had to call was odd too -- no emails or texts this time. I called, I knew my security answer, and yet, they were asking me my phone number. Not only that, they were asking me to add a second phone number -- a second cell phone number specifically -- to verify me. Who has 2 cell phones? No matter what I did I could not get them to verify me : I had every verifiable piece of information available : security word, previous addresses, social security -- none were good enough. They resorted to sending a physical letter to my home address. 

This poses as a safety risk -- I was leaving the next day on a 2 week vacation. But what if I were already on vacation? They would have financially stranded me -- I usually only travel with a single credit card when I travel specifically for security purposes. What if that was the card that I brought? Being stranded in a foreign country without a deep financial resource could have been a very, very dangerous proposition. So there is that. 

Luckily I could change my strategy and took a different card with me. 

While on my trip, once the authorization letter came, I had a third party take a photo and send it to me so I could verify and get on with it : it was incomplete with the top of the letter cut off, so when I called back, I only had the 4 digit verification code, and not the date stamped on the letter. Because of this, the whole thing was scrapped and had to resend yet another letter, postponing it another week! 

When I got back from vacation, and had the new letter in hand, I called again to verify -- and this time, they didn't even need the date all the sudden -- just the 4 digit code, even though the last time I had called they said without the date they couldn't enter it in the screen to lift the fraud warning. It makes no sense! 

So, now, finally with it lifted, I asked to ask for a supervisor to explain it all -- specifically if Citibank, as a company, has XXXX biases to middle eastern companies. 

That is the only thing I can think of : there is no difference in this fraud warning versus the others in the past. The fraud protection must have some kind of filtering process that treats transactions for non-us -- or possibly middle eastern countries -- as alternative fraud systems. 

So not only is the fraud verification system fraught with inconsistency, it's also incredibly dangerous for travelers, and quite possibly powered by racist-leaning algorithms.