I have been a Citibank customer for 15 years with the Oswell St branch being the primary one I used when going into a branch. The branch employees are not the subject of this review but I couldn't find a way to review the entire Citi corporation. My wife and I live about 1 1/2 hours from the nearest branch so most of the transactions with Citi have been my wife using her phone and the Citi app. We've made our share of mistakes of forgetting to transfer money and paid the price for being short of funds but the mistakes were honest oversight, NOT an attempt to cheat. In the past, electronic deposits were credited to our account right after close of business the same day of the deposit unless it was later in the day then it was there before opening time the following morning. Tuesday my wife made a transfer by doing a check by phone early in the morning to cover electronic withdrawals that were scheduled. Later that day (around 1230) I received an email informing me my account was overdrawn. I tried to see what was going on and could not log into my account. Assuming my account had been hacked, I called the call center to report the issue and after waiting on the phone on hold for TWO AND A HALF HOURS, I spoke to a rather rude and snarky lady who informed me my account was being closed because the check my wife had had been dishonored by the issuing bank. My wife looked online at our account from the other bank and there was plenty of money available to cover the check she made to Citi. My wife called the bank to find out what was happening, assuming the Citi employee was being honest. Guess what? The Citi employee was LYING. Citi hadn't even attempted to cash the check. I requested to speak to a supervisor who told me the same lie that the other bank dishonored the check to Citi. The next day, we were on hold for two hours before a representative answered just long enough to answer a couple of questions then tell us he couldn't help us further and transferred our call to another department where we spent another hour on hold until another person answered a few questions then told us he needed to transfer us to a third person. Every employee we spoke to told us the other bank dishonored the check. We again contacted our other bank who repeated that Citi NEVER attempted to cash the check and the bank would honor the check if it was cashed. Last night (4/09/2020) at about 6:30pm my wife checked our account with the other bank and discovered Citi DID cash the check-the same one several Citi employees told us was dishonored by our other bank. They cashed the check 24 hours LATER than they had every time in the past. We also were set to receive our tax return via electronic deposit so we asked the Citi employees about what would happen if the IRS tried to deposit the check into the account Citi closed. All of them we asked said the deposit would be refused because there was no account to deposit the money into. We checked yesterday and the refund was deposited into the supposed closed account. Another thing every Citi employee told us was they wouldn't help us and that we had to go into a branch to get any specific information on account activity. I can understand and forgive honest mistakes but it is absolutely unacceptable for employees of a multi-national corporation to lie to customers, ESPECIALLY since it's the corporation that's feeding the lies to their employees.
Update! I was eligible for a reduced stimulus check and it's next to impossible to change banking information with the IRS. The account Citi employees told me was CLOSED was not; at least not for deposits. I was still precluded from accessing my account online. Citi was still accepting deposits well after we were told the account was closed. I spoke to several Citi employees in their call center and they all refused to give me ANY information regarding activity with the account, telling me the account was closed. My wife called the Oswell St branch and a very helpful lady told us the stimulus money had been deposited on April 16. We were forced to go into the branch to get our stimulus money while the corporate people were doing everything they could to stall us. Then we found out while we were in the branch Citi had refused to honor our mortgage payment THREE times! Remember they cashed the check from our other bank after they said the check was no good, preventing us from paying it out of ANY account. Since the money was in Citi but we couldn't access it online, we simply gave the mortgage company a check by phone which Citi promptly refused, claiming "fraud". Because Citi labeled the money as fraudulent, they refused to allow us to even just withdraw it in cash. Thanks to several branch employees, they finally convinced the fraud department to release the funds so we could make our mortgage payment but not without a lot of arguing back and forth. read more
