Hi everybody, I'm a three-year member of the "wronged by Citifinancial Mortgage" support group.
My problem began in 02/03 when my insurance claim on my home loan was accepted. However, every other month Citi would threaten me and want me to make the loan current, AND THEN they would put the claim in and start over. This happened until 07/03 or so, and by then I no longer needed the claim. The loan was kept current anyway. So no big deal, right?
Enter Bruce from the loss mitigation workout department. He demanded an extra $1500 so he could pay with my money for Citi to file a foreclosure on me and my current loan, which he claimed was late. He started returning my checks to me, so I paid by Western Union at their request.
He never would send any documentation of this. Instead he converted house payments and showed on the statement "Misc. Exspen. Paid".
The law firm in Indiana that he claimed did the work can't be found.
He began rolling back my house payments to cover this missing money and reporting the same consistent lateness on my credit report.
I was stupid to drop the first suit I was bringing in 2003. I was stupid to believe they would really put the money back and fix my credit report. I wasted a year going through every department, trying to get them to honor the deal they made to drop my lawsuit.
They claimed to have fixed the credit report late this year. Instead, they changed several old paid-off associated accounts into "Charge-off as bad debt," and the old charges they claimed to have taken off now seem to be at the end of the loan.
Then they paid property taxes AFTER I had already sent them a copy of the receipt showing that I myself had paid taxes earlier. Citi would not apply the Western Union escrow repayment correctly to the tax payment. Instead they demanded that I modify the loan to include taxes. They would not honor my demand for a declaration of all info on the loan and instead demanded that I modify the loan over the phone, sight unseen. (Yeah, right, pal, I wasn't born last night.)
I'm done complaining. Want to stand together and deal with them? Here's some help. Pay attention, everybody:
File a written complaint, and keep filing new ones every time they give you trouble.
State of Indiana
Dept. of Financial Institutions
30 South Meridian Street, Suite 300
Indpls., IN 46204
Indiana Attorney General's Office
Division of Consumer Protection
Indiana Government Center South, Fifth Floor
302 West Washington Street
Indpls., IN 46204-2770
It sounds stupid to say to call your congressman or representative or the Governor's office, but it seems to help if lots of people have the same problem and they all have the paper trails to prove it. They are trying to help me. Call or email your elected officials.
1) You need to have a paper trail of their actions: every bank statement, payment receipt, and receipt of any expense they have cost you in any way.
2) Keep getting your credit reports every 3-4 months so you can track and prove what they always do to credit reports (so you can't refinance and get away from them).
3) Make payments in a way that lets YOU track where the money went. I'm trying Western Union even if it does cost me a few extra dollars a month, because if you don't, your money will end up in what they call the "unapplied bucket" account, where it sits like my money did for who knows how long (they gather interest on the money from this temporary account).
4) Use the media channels you have. Write down your story and send it with copies of your documentation to newspapers and TV stations. Don't just ask if you can. Don't just try to call for help. Just send it! And keep sending it over and over to all departments.
5) If you must send anything to Citi by mail, make it registered mail and use delivery/signature confirmation. Required.
Also mail a copy person-to-person to yourself and don't open it. Give this envelope to the judge to open, and you can prove what you're saying.
Citigroup hates paper trails.
Try the Associated Press. Look on their website for help.
Look on Citigroup's website and see who they give our money to and also who does business with them. Begin a letter and email campaign to these companies and tell them where the money came from and how it was gotten, and avoid those companies for having anything to do with Citi.
Don't give Citi the OK to share your info with anyone. They just sent me another privacy choices form, and I sent it back with "don't share anything with anyone ever" signed and dated. I mailed the copy of the whole thing and kept the original.
You do know that Citi claims that the private info of 3 million of us just fell off the back of a delivery van early last year. It seems the box went right through the locked steel door. It was never found, and nothing was ever done about it either.
Could they have leaked a bogus media excuse to cover up the fact that they had already sold our private info? And now we all get stuck with identity theft? Hmmm.
I wonder what would happen if someone looked up all the Indiana legal cases that currently involve this company or have recently, and then began linking up with these people all over the state.
Maybe someone in Indiana will take out a newspaper ad asking for info from other Citi customers having trouble and gather everyone together. Or a citifinancialalert account from Hotmail.
I know there are plenty of people just now finding this very site who are having this same problem with Citi and just haven't yet filed for whatever reason.
Contact the state's free legal aid. Call them. Your local library sometimes offers free legal help. Use all the above steps and then go file.
Sure would be nice if we could all file together at one time and make a media circus for Citi to have to deal with. We could then approach the attorney general and the governor with this mess as a whole, a large group of people now, and maybe with media help.
Even if we went with a contingency suit and don't get any cash, we keep our homes and any old out-of-pocket claims we can prove.
No attorney in his right mind would pass it up. Even the higher-ups in state government would have to notice and want to get involved in this one.
File as one and stand as one. Nobody wants to settle! (Why hurry to settle? How many years have they wasted already?)
The federal government gets involved again. (Every customer has been victimized by the same company and the same departments, and I'll bet that the same employees' names, phone numbers and extension numbers keep popping up from case to case.)
I wonder how long it would take to get their own employees to crack and snitch on them to try to save their own skins.
THAT would just drive Citi nuts. And Wall Street wouldn't be real happy with Citi either.
None of us can deal with this alone, and neither can you, or you wouldn't be here right now, would you?
Ready to stand together in Indiana? I'll get back to everybody real soon, so check back.
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