I have several accounts with gas companies such as Shell, CItgo, Phillips66 and Exxon. Recently they were all taken over by Citibank.
A couple of months ago I got a call from "Citibank Client Services." The gist of the call was that since I had several Citibank accounts, they wanted to offer me the opportunity of managing all of my accounts automatically, i.E. Give them my bank account information and they would take care of making the payments due. I had been doing them myself manually, so it seemed like a good idea since it would relieve me of the worry of having to monitor the accounts, avert late fees, etc. And arranging for all of the accounts individually every month. I spent about half an hour on the phone with one of their reps in February setting this up.
It turned out to be the biggest mistake of my life! The accounts are all screwed up now as Citibank failed to deduct the correct minimum payments and now they have socked me with delinquency charges and late fees! I had a ridiculous conversation with one of their "reps" on the phone on Monday where she assured me that "You were never told" that Citibank would manage the accounts in this way! I said are you KIDDING< I have notices mailed to me by Citibank which promised, in black and white, that these payments would be made! Then she started lecturing me about how I wasn't giving her a chance to explain. She managed to remove the late charges from my Phillips66 account but today I found out the SAME THING is happening to my SHELL account! As it turns out, the person who called me to "set up" these payments either did not know what he was doing or incorrectly laid out the program. Because they actually do NOT have a monthly minimum payment program; it is a RECURRING payment program which sounds like the same thing but it is NOT! If the recurring amount is not the minimum, then you will incur late charges and fees! Naturally they do not tell you this! Obviously this is a GIANT SCAM to get the consumers to trust them and then put them in delinquency deliberately so they can rack up fees!
I have already reported them to the FDIC for this scam and I hope everyone else does too. The FDIC is online (Google them) and you can get access to an online complaint form. I would like the FDIC to be inundated with complains about Citibank so they will eb FORCED to change their practices!
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