Citibank
Air Miles Program Called a Fraud Against Vendors and Cardholders
- 07-03-2002
- 24
Citibank is but one of a group of banks using Visa and MasterCard plastic to defraud vendors through the use of bribes! "Air Miles" is the bribe. You (Party A) hold a credit card from Citibank (Party B), and they say to you, "Instead of cash or checks, use our card at each vendor (Party C), and in return we will give you credit of a mile of air travel for each dollar spent." This is a gigantic fraud. Nothing is free. Someone pays.
Here, Citibank (and MBNA, Wells Fargo, OFleet, Capital One) are charging the merchant for those "air miles." On each transaction, he pays a fee. Then you are (temporarily) credited with those miles. You can lose them, you know. They can do all sorts of things with those miles, but in the meantime, you have helped them cheat the vendors.
Ken Stork is CEO of Citibank, PO Box 6000, Sioux Falls, SD 57117. Sanford Weill heads Citicorp, which owns Citibank. Write him at his NY office and complain. That was their aim in the beginning, to cheat the vendors. Build their business by making the vendor pay for it. A double cross by Citibank. A scam against the merchants by Citibank. They make billions, and the vendors lose billions. So do the cardholders who run up bills and then cannot afford to pay.
American Express=American Excess pulls the same scam. The vendor pays 4% of the amount of the sale to American Excess. Ken Chenault is the CEO of American Excess. Write him at: 200 Vesey Street, N.Y.
So far, 7 trillion miles have been credited to their trusting cardholders. You would have to book fares to Mars in order to use them all up. The American air fleets cannot fill those numbers, that is certain. That is a fraud in itself. It is a gigantic fraud, a hoax, a scam, and YOU and the VENDORS are the ones who get taken.
To me, a company that scams its vendors and its cardholders like this has a close kinship with the old protection rackets in NYC in the 1930s. It is a racket, no more, no less.
Company: Citibank
Country: USA
State: South Dakota
City: Sioux Falls
Address: P.O. Box 6000