Glad to see I'm not the only one. We should all get together with a good attorney and expose these bloodsuckers for what they are: vampires.
In 1997 I took out a $1500 loan to go on my honeymoon. I am still paying on this loan, $100 a month, and the principal is still around $3K. It is not right at all. Like others I have read about on the net, I was forced into refinancing when the child support rug was pulled out from under me. They don't care. All they want is their money.
When I did the last refinance, all I wanted was to end the harassing phone calls to my job. Don't the idiots realize that people can lose their jobs because of this? Oh yeah, I forgot, they don't care. And yes, I know I should read the fine print and know what I'm getting into. But when you are harassed and worried that your property is going to be taken from you if you don't do something immediately, you will sign and initial just to get them off your back.
Anyway, in the past year I had to send four letters to the local branch, the last one stating that I had the right to sue if they didn't stop. Well, they did stop, but then they started in on my cell. I sent three letters telling them to stop calling me, that I'm too busy at my job and at home to talk to them, and to send me correspondence by mail. I provided my address at the bottom of the letters twice. Not to mention that the envelopes of all these letters, as well as the payments I've made in the past, all have return address labels with the proper address.
I was one payment behind when the calls started coming. I don't answer, but it takes minutes off my plan. They call at least twice a day, every day, even though I've sent these letters explaining my situation and how to communicate with me.
I've also told them that I'm trying to find a way to pay them off once and for all, that I need a payoff balance, and that I wanted to cancel my insurance. One message left by the manager said that I couldn't do so, that I misunderstood my paperwork, and for me to call her. I refuse to call them, because I know all they're going to do is talk me into refinancing again, which I'm trying to avoid.
After weeks of waiting and enduring the harassing phone calls on my cell, I had had enough. The other day, right before I was to take our mail to the post office, I made the call to them. The manager answered, and I bet she wishes she hadn't. I really let her have it. I told her I didn't have time to talk, that I had just a few minutes before I had to head to the post office (my job), and that I just wanted to tell them to stop calling my cell and to send the info I had requested twice to my address. I told her this, trying four times during this phone call to get off the phone.
She had the nerve to tell me not to talk to her that way. I informed her that I woke up in the U.S.A. this morning and, according to the First Amendment, I have the right to freedom of speech, and I will talk to anyone I please in any way I choose. If she doesn't like it, then they shouldn't insist and demand that I call them, and they should do as I requested and correspond with me by mail.
Then she got rude, saying that she had sent two letters to me telling me that she cancelled the insurance on 4/11, and another letter that took her 30 minutes to type (a manager who can't type a letter faster than that shouldn't have that position). She didn't save it, but she would retype it and send it to me AGAIN, but she needed my address.
I exploded: "Y'all aren't looking at what's sent to y'all?! It clearly states my address on my letters to y'all. Y'all can't read???" She asked what address. I started, and she finished it, except it turned out that she had the wrong city and state on all my paperwork and had sent my letters, along with statements that I haven't received in months, to that wrong address. I moved to Charlotte, NC from Rock Hill, SC in 7/04, and the refinance was done in 10/04. Duh! They got it wrong. There is no such street in Rock Hill, SC. The statements and letters would have been returned to them undeliverable. THEN she was all apologetic and said she would send me the letters again, but it might be too late to stop legal action against me.
But that's not the end of it. Like I said, I had just a few minutes to make this call before having to leave to do my job. She started in on "the good guy speech" that I've been reading about on the net that Citi does.
She told me that, according to my paperwork, I make very good money and she doesn't understand why I can't make a $102 monthly payment. I told her that since my support hasn't come in for 2 months, I can barely buy groceries for me and my kid and have gas money to get to my job, to earn a check, to pay my bills. I told her that I only get paid once a month, and I'm scraping by at the end of the month just to get by.
Now, check this out. It just shows that this organization is clearly not organized. She said she couldn't understand that, because I make $4400.00 a month. I told her that if I made that kind of money, I wouldn't be behind in anything. I don't even gross half of that figure. I don't know where she got that figure, but I have an idea.
I got to thinking that every time I've had to refinance, they needed collateral. Last time, an employee kept hounding me to find things around my home to use for collateral. She even "generated" things, inflating the cost of the items so that I could qualify for the refinance. One is my computer, which I still owe Dell for (I read my paperwork this evening), so I can't do that. She never asked if it was genuinely mine or not.
So I'm thinking that this employee made up the figures to get this refinance qualified to meet her quota. I was told that this deal would lower my payments and my interest rate. Wrong! Payments didn't go down, and the interest went from 18.99% to 24.99%. But get this.
I wish I had looked over the paperwork earlier. Be forewarned to do so with these vampires!!! It all looks like a foreign language to me. I think they do that intentionally to sneak things into the loan. I saw where the box is checked saying that this is an unsecured loan. So far, and I'm still researching, I don't see a list of items used as collateral. So I can throw my hands up and let this go instead of wasting any more money and time on it. My credit is bad because of men in my past. So why bother paying them anymore? According to my calculations, they have gotten almost $8K for a $1500 loan. To me, they have gotten their money back several times over. I don't owe them anything.
I finally got a letter today. It has no payoff balance and no information about the insurance that is supposedly cancelled. It only states that I have until 5/16 to pay them $330.00 or legal action will be taken.
I have sent complaints to the FTC, the BBB and a local lawyer's office in the hope of, at the very least, showing this bloodsucking corporation that I'm not going to be their victim any longer. Can't squeeze blood from a turnip...
If there is any attorney out there who wants to win big, they need to research this, get all of us together and take these vampires down. They're ruining lives as well as our national economy while they get bloated like ticks. Does anyone want to join in this crusade? State your report here, and hopefully this site will help us all drive a stake into the heart of the Citi vampire!
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