- Marriott Plans To Open “Nearly 100” Asia Pacific Properties In 2021 by Traveling For Miles.
- Amazon Prime member total reaches 142 million in U.S. with more shoppers opting in for a full year, data shows by MarketWatch.
- NJ man loses $80K in life savings after routine bank transfer by ABC 7 Chicago. This almost sounds like it could be a DoC reader with the Chime account and chasing the Citi $700 bonus.
- 10% back on Viator, but Capital One Offers have otherwise declined by Frequent Miler.
Deals starting/expiring at the end of today or starting today (view the full deal calendar here):
- Chase Offers/BofA: Get 5% Back At Dell.com On Purchases $999-$2,400
- Bank Amerideals/Chase Offers: Save 5%-15% at IHG Brands, Max $31 Cashback
Deals starting/expiring at end of tomorrow:
- None
Popular posts from yesterday:
Citi is definitely one of the worst banks in my experience. In 2019 they they flat out refused to give me my 50K bonus for Citi Premier I was supposed to get. Spoke to several employees and managers, and they all lied about the timeline of me closing previous account (more than 2 years ago) and opening new account. I closed all accounts with them (had three credit cards) because of that.
Complained to BBB. Got a letter from Citi that acknowledged I was eligible for the bonus and they refused me the bonus in error, but if I wanted it, I had to re-apply for Citi Prestige and re-open that account. No thank you, you robbed me once. Also it was BS – my Thank You account was still valid so they could’ve deposited the points they owed me.
I’m personally done with Citi, regardless of the offers. That was just the worst example of their incompetence. There were less serious transgressions of their part, like me having to call half a dozen times and replace my credit card and get new credit card number *twice* due to the same fraudulent transaction on my account. Turns out customer service team didn’t talk to their security team the first time, so I had to “try again”. They finally got it right… Complete clowns.
What did the Consumer Financial Product Bureau say? You did report it to them, right?
Just saw a strange notice starting with “Effective immediately, as a security measure to protect Citibank accounts, the limits for next day Inter Institutional Transfers to your External Accounts…”. So maybe something is going with Citi after all.
This has been there for the 10 days or so since I opened my account. As far as I know it only affects pushes to other external accounts from Citi. $50 limit for next day, over that will be the slower 3 day transfer.
BTW I just successfully pushed $50k from Ally yesterday and it showed up fine this morning(phew!). I’ll post more details in the Citi bonus thread.
The more I read the horror stories people go through with banks and transfers the more Im accepting of Crypto actually ending up what they say it would.
Cash is king. That is until you get your cash seized. Fail to see how crypto should be different.
just don’t forgot your private key 😀
Citi and Chime, the best combo to steal your money. had similar issue with Citi where they just lock your account for no reason and give your the run around where phone says “go to branch” but branch says “call the phone”. didn’t even nee do anything or transfer when this happened
Definitely a reason why I’ve never tried a Citi account. Too many bad stories out there.
There are now enough DP’s about Chime that everyone should avoid them like the plague. It’s clear their anti-fraud algorithm triggers many false positives. It happens so often that I’ve come to the conclusion their algorithm is total trash. Locking up legitimate transfers and holding people’s money because you’re afraid of being defrauded, is poor service. They need to go out of business if they can’t design a service that allows people to transfer money to themselves.
Wow almost this exact thing happened to me with Citi a couple years ago – thankfully only for a few thousand and not my life savings though.
It took me about two months to get my money back. I filed multiple reports with CFPB and BBB with detailed logs of every interaction and event that happened with them and my money, but they were always dismissed after Citi followed up saying they were in the right. I went to multiple branches multiple times but they apparently couldn’t do a thing. One banker tried really hard to help but only came up with a different Citi phone number. I must have called a dozen times (to that and other phone numbers) and nobody could or would help.
It turned out I needed to find one specific person in the whole Citi organization who put the lock on my account to lift it. Literally nobody else could do it, according to more than one rep. So I had to track this guy down by name and get him when he wasn’t using PTO (he apparently had a lot) and talk to him while he unlocked it. Unreal experience. Never received the bonus, and explanation, or an apology the whole time. I’m not surprised the person in the article had to make it in mainstream media just to get his money back, and I’m sure he won’t be offered a nickel more despite the aggravation and hardship it caused him.
It’s stories like this that my own experience of Citi trying to revert the Citigold offers back in the day that I have vowed to never do business with Citi again. Fuck Citi.
The ACH transfers are most likely being tripped up as fraudulent. Why? Because CHIME and its ilk are not banks; they act as intermediaries with “power of attorney” like capacities to transfer funds on behalf of someone else – you.
The nuances between CHIME and plain ol’ vanilla banking institutions are going to wreck a lot of people until the US gets its act together and regulates by behavior, not by definition.
Citi is extremely touchy, reports of transfers being rejected before receiving and activating the debit card. Closing your account is another fun one, for many people(myself included) they don’t close the account right the first time so pennies of interest post at the end of your statement and trigger a monthly fee which triggers an overdraft. Issues with user IDs linked to Citi credit cards getting locked up when you close checking/savings accounts. It’s a long list of issues with them.
They are NOT a bank you can just sign up and pull over a large sum of money right away. Every step should be calculated if you want to dance with them. If you don’t do things exactly right you will run into problems. Part of this guy’s issue was probably using Chime which has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. I’d use a major well known bank like Ally to push to Citi.
I(orP2) have done PUSHes from OrionCU, Simple Bank, and Ally, and they went okay, though one resulted in a 3-way call (can’t remember which). So definitely push from outside to Citi. But nevertheless, I’m done with Citi bank bonuses, since I get 3%+ from rewards checking accounts, and the marginal extra from a Citi bank bonus doesn’t compensate the risk/hassle for me. These Citi bank bonuses are good if everything goes right, but if things go bad, they go really bad.
In general, churning behavior probably resembles fraud so it triggers false positives. When a consumer opens 10 bank accounts in a year all around the US, and does many ACH transfers among them, that behavior is considered abnormal. Then all it takes is one addition innocent thing, like opening some accounts after you changed your phone number or moved to a new address, and boom, you’ve triggered the bank’s internal anti-fraud control.
Not exactly sure how and why account opening and closing should raise a flag – everything is transparent and easily traceable. The sums involved are usually not very substantial, especially compared to e.g. the rampant PPP fraud.
This particular instance seems like a Chime problem, not Citi problem. They had the primary responsibility to investigate what happened with the transfer. Of course, Chime has no branches, it is not even a bank per se. So that poor guy naturally starting by reaching out to Citi. Glad it worked out for him, must have been very unpleasant.
I had that ridiculous issue with fees due to pennies of interest after trying to close the account. Amateur bank.
Does ACLU or similar organizations help in these situations? (genuine question)
I doubt they would care – it doesn’t seem to be a civil rights question. There are some established channels for resolving these questions though – you can go to the state Attorney, bank regulators, or the CFPB/FTC.
Sometimes, also Institute for Justice as a lot of these freezes are due to over aggressive anti-money laundering policies and civil asset forfeiture. But as long as you’re above board the quickest solution is usually a huge barrage of complaints to state AGs or consumer advocates, BBB, banking regulators at state and federal level.