Short Citi stock! They are incompetent and evil
I’ve had a Citi credit card (CC) for more than 22 years. I’ve paid my bill every single month. They are constantly asking me if I want to raise my credit limit (I always decline, it’s high enough, thank you).
On 7/29 they closed my account. I spent more than 2 hours that day and more then next on the phone trying to resolve this and get an explanation.
In all the calls (I probably talked with 10 or more people in 2 days), I talked to the fraud department 3 times. The first two times, they told me they didn’t close the account and there was absolutely no problem with my account. The other calls to other departments always said it was the fraud department that had put a hold on my account and that’s why it was closed. The third time talking with the fraud department they “unlocked” the account after asking me about a recent, valid purchase. I got no text messages about this purchase. I got no phone calls or emails. Result: close the account!
Well, it turns out, all the information about the fraud department being responsible was incorrect. A lie or just misinformed? I don’t know. I didn’t find out the real reason until 7/30.
Let’s put all that aside and talk about billing.
When you use billpay at your bank, there is a secret threshold where if the amount you are paying is more than that threshold, a paper check is sent rather than sending the funds electronically. This is normal, but mostly it comes into play with CC payments. Large payments, for whatever reason, are shunted to paper instead of paying them via electronic means. This threshold is secret and never disclosed. More on that later.
In May 2025, I had a rather large CC bill. I pay my insurance and other bills through the card, so I can get cash back. The bill was paid via check. It was sent 2 weeks before the bill was due, but by the due date it had not been posted to the account. So, I made a manual payment of the same amount as the check, the day before the bill was due. I also stopped payment on the paper check mailed by my bank, so I wouldn’t double pay.
As soon as I made the payment, Citi posted the original payment that my bank sent. They dated it from the day before my manual payment. So, while I was talking to a customer service rep, they had the check.
My July 2025 bill was also large, and also paid via a paper check. It was mailed on 6/30, and by the due date (7/10) still had not been posted. On July 15, I made a manual payment and stopped payment of the paper check. I also got a refund of the interest charges. The customer service rep was nice enough to do that, since it was clear they had a problem with my payment, for a second time.
On July 19 the check mailed in June was finally posted, but then reversed when they realized there was a stop payment on it.
Two payments that took too long to process resulted in me making manual payments, and two stop payments since I didn’t want to pay my bill twice.
Put that all aside and let’s talk about statement balances.
My statement balance for July (the amount that I needed to pay to prevent any interest charges) was inflated because of the problem with the May payments. The July bill was generated on June 15, and on June 15 they thought I hadn’t paid my bill yet, so the payment amount for July was inflated by amount of the May bill. The May bill which was paid twice.
This all cascaded into the statement generated on July 15 (due August 10). That payment was highly inflated.
Here’s my grave error:
On July 15, I set my bank to automatically pay my bill when they receive it, rather than have it get there “3 days before it is due” is what I had used for many years WITHOUT PROBLEM. The reason is obvious, I knew Citi was holding onto the checks to make the payments late, so they could collect late fees.
What I should have done was disable billpay for Citi until all of this settled down, THEN turned it back on to be paid immediately.
Why was this a grave error? Because the crazy statement balance on 7/15 was automatically scheduled to be paid right after I made that bill pay change. So, a large check was scheduled to be sent to Citi. I called my bank and tried to stop it, but failed. So, I put a stop payment on that check. That’s right, this is the 3rd stop payment. The 3rd one is one me, though, I should never have enabled bill pay until all this blew over.
So, the end of this tale is that my account was closed due to exessive stop payments. The final phone call I had, I was told the closure was permanent and I could only appeal to the “Office of the President” sent via US mail.
Back to that threshold… when I was talking with a manager at Citi, she said something she probably shouldn’t have:
Citi has a known issue, which they are trying to solve, which lowered the electronic payment limit. It will take a few months to solve.
What I think Citi did was to lower the electronic payment limit to force more paper checks so people like me would now be paying their bill late. I obviously don’t have proof of this, but I highly doubt it would take months to restore the limit they previously had. It’s beyond belief. They also could have slowed down the processing of checks. My July payment took almost 3 weeks to process!! I think all this was done intentionally to make money on late fees. Multiple people at Citi confirmed to me that many people were having issues with this. I wasn’t the only one complaining of this.
At this point, I can’t tell if it’s massive incompetence or just plain evil. It’s likely some of both. The army of support reps have zero power to resolve issues decided by software. Was it an accident the electronic threshold was lowered at the same time paper check processing was slowed? It’s hard to say.
It’s hard to describe the helpless feeling when being faced with problems of this sort. I am reminded of the Franz Kafka novel The Trial (aka Der Process in German), where Josef K was “arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessiable authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.”