Some people don't deserve a second chance
I love to hate 2 banks in India - Citibank and the other one (which recruits in truckloads from campuses). Very disfunctional. Both promise to make your life easy and make it a whole lot difficult. I had cancelled my Citi credit card back during b-school because of a couple of bad experiences. And I vowed to stay away. But because I have to bank with them on the salary account, I thought I'd give them a second chance to help me make my personal banking more convenient. I wanted a co-branded card because of specific benefits (tied to my phone company) - and got a gold card instead. First moment of disappointment as soon as you open the envelope! Then to link this card to the suvidha account I wanted to balance transfer the amount on another card. But no, they wanted 1200 rupees to do that and a 3% fore-closure fees. This is from a person who is a new customer and they are just making money out of me without me even swiping the card once!!! Go figure. I wonder what's the method to this madness. They actually get a customer from a competitor but want to make his life quite difficult! So I ordered my card cancelled. Simple. Must be the shortest time I've ever owned a card. No wonder the 'Citi never sleeps'. Customers must be giving them sleepless nights!!!
Update:
Looks like I wasn't the only one in strife! Desipundit has this compilation here and Arzan has one here.
posted by maverick @ 2:11 AM
7 Comments:
Tell me about it.. Citibank screwed me over on my Credit Card, arbitrarily increasing my interest amount driving me into a deeper hole. Quite messed up, and now I've closed accounts with them, they're spreading the love. Oh, and have you have had a 'pleasant' experience with their call-centre as yet?
Linked here
Never ever have a citi credit card along with a citi sal account. not only the rates keep rising they withdraw from the sal account as and when they fancy. For two months they withdrew two months payment in one go claiming some fine print which they never explained. I am just trying to get money in bulk and pay my entire dues and just cancel my account.
@K: they insist that its 2.95% compounded across all its cards. i have a sneaky suspicion that it isnt true. call centre is awesome. they love to give answers to questions u havent asked and not answer the questions u did ask. nice ain't it?
@arzan: thanks
@sapphire: that was also a worry for me, coz i have seen what u wrote happen to colleagues of mine. so when i asked abt it, the guy said, 'sir, please subtract the minimum amount from what u going to pay' - coz the min amt anyways gets deducted even if u did pay more than that for the month...i didnt know whether to laugh or to cry!
Here's another:
StanChart didn't send me a statement on time. (Needless to say, I don't consider it my responsibility to keep track of when card statements and payments are due - it's the service provider's job.) Then, the day after payment was due, they called: "Madam, your payment is due. Should we send someone to collect it at a charge of Rs. 50?" "No", I told them. "You'll get the payment within 24 hours of my receiving the statement." "Alright, madam, we will fax the statement to you." So naturally, I didn't get the statement till a week later. This is where the (eerie music starts) plot thickens: in my next statement, not only had they charged me interest and service charges for "delayed payment", they also charged me the 50 bucks for picking up the payment - which was a service that they, technically speaking, had not actually provided. Despite multiple phone calls and emails (to call centers, naturally, where you can threaten the poor kids who take calls till kingdom comes but never get anywhere because they don't have the authority to do anything about it), the statements continued to come, each with mounting service charges and interest. Finally, I cut up the card into shreds and mailed it to SCB with a letter. They called back and offered to replace the card. No mention of the inappropriate billing, no apologies. I said no. They sent me a fresh card anyway, and the next statement on that one STILL had the charges.
If this isn't enough to drive one nuts, I'm not sure what is.
Screw up is that every card provider is like this in some way or other. I've had trouble with Citi, SCB, ICICI and even HSBC (which I thought for the longest time was near-perfect).
All considered, I think I'll just stick to cash, and burn the plastic.
@progga: good idea, but if ure here (USA/Canada) in the wild wild west, not having plastic means ure a social outcast and none of ure basic stuff like phones, house mortages etc will ever happen (due to no credit building). So basically we have to live with these and continue to love to hate them!
I had an account in citibank. An I used their overdraft facility once. After making the interest shoot up, they made me pay half the amount(unbelievable!!) I took as overdraft. I closed the overdraft. Then they sent me a credit card without my applying for it. Then they charged me service charge of 4669 Rs for the credit card I didnt use. I told them to close my account. Which they promptly refused until I cleared up all their cooked up dues and sent a mail to chennai for the closure.
The plots seems to get thicker as there is no guarantee that they will close the account citing lost mail ... and further charge me service charges which may sound like new word from a dictionary.
They have ensured that the chap who use citibank never sleeps.
I may have to approach the consumer court
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