Getting cheated is something I admit I have trouble letting go. My Citi Advantage Card, like all credit cards, does two jobs for me. One, it protects me when a retailer does not deliver. Two, it collects points for travel.
Neiman Marcus needed five weeks to handle a return, billed my card again that very day, and I put in twenty hours on the phone, plus faxed my card statements to them. It never got fixed. After that I understood that the system is not really built for consumers. It is plain to see.
Later my card was stolen. I was away from home and had no idea until Citi rang me. I was thrilled with the service, very thankful, and figured they had nabbed the thief, though they would not tell me. But they would not take off the fraudulent charges either. To force Citicards to reverse them, I ended up hiring an outside firm to draft a monthly sum from my bank account.
Next came Hertz, which overbilled my account by $1,200, after I had already put in some 200 hours dealing with Citi. That is a hefty sum, surely.
Over half a year I gave up hundreds of hours to calls and handed over every document they asked for, which was a major effort. They froze my account and rang me twenty times daily. I felt terrorized.
On every call I explained everything from scratch, then waited an hour to be connected with Fraud, which is the department that deals with chargebacks, however baseless the charge is and however plain that is.
One evening, a Citi executive rang and was honest with me. Hertz, he said, refused to talk about the charge with Citi, and in two decades he had never seen anything like it. I was grateful for his frankness. Still, I would have been happier if Citibank had seen me as its customer, one who was billed an arbitrary figure before any invoice had been worked out, mailed to me, or approved by me.
The final word from them was that I would have to live with the charge, plus interest and, after six months, penalties. My credit is nearly destroyed, and they act puzzled about what could be wrong at their end.
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