Consumer complaint received 2025-12-22 00:00:00
Product: Credit card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem with a purchase shown on your statement — Credit card company isn't resolving a dispute about a purchase on your statement
Company: CITIBANK, N.A.
State: FL

Complaint narrative:
I spoke to a CITI Dispute Representative on XX/XX/XXXX who advised me to officially contest their current final judgement on a {$7000.00} fraudulent charge. The Case ID # is ( XXXX ) which has been ongoing since XX/XX/year>. This case involves a vendor in XXXX that received {$9500.00} ( {$7000.00} charged on my CITI credit card and {$2500.00} via check ) as a deposit for tour services in XXXX. Within 48 hours of receiving the final itinerary and housing details, we cancelled our participation on this tour, over 50 days before the start of the tour. No tour services were provided by the vendor. We contacted the vendor to process a refund but he became unresponsive and decided to keep the entire {$9500.00} deposit. There was no legal or expense documentation to support his actions. 

The summary of this case is provided below. 

CITI assigned us a burden of proof on this dispute. We provided multiple documents under the above case ID # supporting our good faith efforts to resolve this matter and the vendor admitted he did not provide tour services to us in his correspondence with CITI. After the CITI investigator reviewed all documentation, I received an XX/XX/year> letter from CITI agreeing with my claim as they were now " working with the merchant or merchant 's bank to obtain a permanent credit for this charge. '' Eight weeks later, CITI wants to reverse the credit we were given claiming they, " attempted to resolve with the merchant but were not successful. The merchant will not honor our request for credit based on the information you provided us. '' This is completely unacceptable. CITI stated in their XX/XX/year> letter that " the merchant will not honor our request for credit ''. In no way does this CITI fraud protection policy protect me from fraudulent financial charges by asking a merchant if he wants to return money for services he did not perform. 

I am not responsible for such a completely inadequate CITI process and should not be penalized. CITI owns the burden of protecting their customers from this type of fraudulent activity, especially when they agreed the credit should be permanent. We expect CITI to fully support us in this fraudulent transaction as the merchant has been unable to justify any expenses over the past 5 months. A policy of asking if the merchant will agree to return unearned money is completely unacceptable. No services were performed by the merchant. A refund of a deposit is warranted. 

I spoke with a CITI XXXX XXXX XXXX representative today that explained the reason XXXX ruled against me was based on the reason for dispute selected Goods / services not as expected. The investigators notes suggested I would need to go on the tour to determine if services were not as expected. This is ridiculous. Regardless of my reasons for cancellation almost 2 months before the tour, services were never rendered by the merchant. This case was totally based on cancellation of future services never performed and the return of my deposit. 

Reasons for a dispute are limited on the CITI website form and there was no exact match for cancelling future services. The CITI representative said a better choice may have been canceled or attempted to cancel this transaction for goods/ services from this merchant even though site descriptions are about current services. I did attempt to change the reason to fraud during the review but the CITI Dispute/Fraud phone representative said it did not matter as the same group reviews the case and the reason doesnt matter.

The CITI Executive Response Unit representative agreed that the case was about services never rendered and not the reason the future services were cancelled. The representative planned to resubmit this complaint to CITI fraud/dispute explaining the decision should not be made based on expected services but services not rendered. The process for selecting a finite number of general complaint reasons online and the lack of logic by the XXXX investigator to rule fairly on a dispute/fraud issue is completely inadequate. Finding out the case was decided based on services not as expected and ignoring the fact that services were not performed is appalling. 

I have attached some of the previously sent documents as follows : - Initial CITI dispute email which includes a case summary and attached documents. - Email sent to CITI investigators in response to the merchant 's email about the dispute. - CITI letter stating they were working on making the {$7000.00} credit permanent. - CITI letter stating the merchant will not honor our request for credit. There is additional documentation sent to CITI over the past 5 months that is part of the case ID above. I can resend any previously sent documents if these are unavailable to the reviewer.

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