Why Citibank is run by a bunch of loose-headed, incompetent & dishonest swindlers

i've always had a strong bias against grouchy salesgirls, golddigging beauticians and dishonest bankers, but never in my life have i felt so strongly against one bank that i feel compelled to publish all the dirt i can about it on my blogsite...

Just the other day, my husband and i met a very good friend of my father's - a prominent banker who had left Citibank in one of the most extensive exoduses in the bank's history. Together with many others who had shaped the landscape of Citibank's corporate history through the decades, he decided it was time to leave an organisation which did not recognise and reward the successes attributed to his hard work and to employ his talents elsewhere.

Which leads me to the inevitable conclusion that Citibank must now be overrun with ranks of incompetent, arrogant and uneducated Ah Bengs who think that their customers are equally uneducated and helpless, ever-willing prey to their unethical and underhanded tactics - well at least this is what we experienced on the ground anyway.

My first brush with their destructive duplicity was when i accompanied my mother to see her personal banker at the very "exclusive" Citigold Wealth Management Banking department. When i asked the banker what this department did for its customers, my mother exploded, "Wealth management, my foot! They only know how to make you lose money!" i knew exactly what she was talking about. During my five years in the UK, these "Wealth Management Experts" had constantly barraged my mother with phone calls to invest all her savings in tech stocks which were clearly heading for a downfall in the late 1990's. If i had been around to advise my mother, i would have told her to disconnect the phone line and tell these uneducated folks to get lost. But she didn't know nuts about investing, so she plunged a sizeable amount of her savings into these vacuous stocks and made her banker an equally sizeable amount of commission. Today, the value of those stocks are less than 1/4 of what my mother had originally invested in...

Then came the time when my husband and i both applied for the Citibank Tangs credit card. A few weeks after our application was approved, some annoying folks from the Telesales Department kept calling my husband about an insurance plan which he had absolutely no interest in. He made this clear to the "Acquisition Officer" (a.k.a. "Salesgirl") who had called him. One month later, however, they sneaked in charges for TWO insurance plans into our credit card bill and this went on for two months (and several phone calls) before we could finally get them to cancel and reverse the charges!

The same thing (only more insane and absurd) happened after we had refinanced our mortgage to Citibank last year. Under the new mortgage arrangement, we have to pay a fire insurance premium of $77.24 to their good friend, the RSA (Royal Sun & Alliance) every year. After the first $77.24 was deducted from our bank account, i noticed another entry hidden away in the fine print - almost imperceptible to the naked eye - of $36.75 also under the dubious heading of "Fire Insurance". When I called Citiphone up about this, i was told to call RSA because they might have deducted a second premium from my account by mistake. When i called RSA, however, they insisted that there should have only been one charge so Citibank must have made the extra deduction by mistake. After bouncing the ball back and forth between themselves for a while, they finally reversed the $36.75 charge made to my bill.

Another thing which i hate about their marketing tactics is the way they try and push their credit cards to you. After a day of shopping at Tangs for our wedding day, we were told to redeem one of our lucky draw vouchers at the Citibank promotion booth outside. There, a whole battalion of Ah Lian-looking promoters (who probably attended Ah Lian schools) began attacking us with application forms for new credit cards. When we said that we were not interested because we already had our Citibank Tangs card, this Ah Beng guy offered us free gifts if we signed up for two credit cards. With nothing to lose, we filled out the forms for the cards. What made us piqued, however, was that after we submitted the two forms to him, the Ah Beng had the cheek to say that we didn't qualify for the free gifts!!

What other deceitful and misleading tactics have the Citibank charlatans used on us helpless and innocent customers? If i were to list all of them here, including the ones which have beguiled my friends and relatives, i am sure that even blogger or google could not contain them all on their server...

But the one which really distressed me most was when my husband and i recently paid for our air tickets to Cairns using our Citibank Gold Mastercard (incurring a 2% extra charge but which we didn't mind because of the "Travel Inconvenience Insurance" which supposedly came with it). This insurance program is supposed to "lessen the frustration and inconvenience" due to unforseen events such as delayed flights, etc. Well, as it happened, our flight back home was delayed for 8.5 hours so we were covered under this program which was supposed to reimburse us for the cost of "meals, refreshments, hotel accommodation, telephone calls, transport charges to and from the airport as well as purchase of essential clothing and requisites..." Now nowhere on the brochure did it specify whether it covered only foreign airports, airports at both departure and arrival points or only home airports. In fact the identical program run under the Citibank Clear Card even states "transport charges to and from airports".

When we finally arrived back in Singapore, it was 3.30am in the morning and we had to take a taxi back home (thus incurring midnight charges etcetc). If this was not a "travel inconvenience", tell me what is! Now before we hopped into the cab, we checked the brochure one last time and saw the part which said "transport charges to and from the airport". Cool! So now what we had to do was to charge the taxi fare to our Citibank credit card so we could claim it from the insurers later on! This incurred an extra 15% charge on our already exorbitant taxi fare, but never mind!

When we tried to submit our claims to Alexander Forbes (another good friend of you-know-who) a few days later, we were so peeved when they told us that this taxi fare would not be claimable!

1. If you were an educated and intelligent life form like me, i'm sure you would agree that you would have considered taking a taxi from Changi Airport a "transport charge to/from the airport".

2. Since there was no indication as to whether only foreign airports were covered under this clause, any reasonable person would have been led to believe that this included Changi airport as well, since we were suffering from a "travel inconvenience" as a result of the flight delay.

3. If their argument that the policy applies only when one is "stranded" overseas were to stand, then customers whose flights out of Changi are delayed would not be able to benefit from this "travel inconvenience insurance" at all, even if they have to purchase extra meals, drinks, etc while waiting at Changi Airport! And what if they have to take a taxi home to wait out the delay - would that be covered as well?

4. The most annoying fact is that NONE of these qualifications were printed on the brochure - did they expect us to call them up at 3.30am in the morning to verify each clause before executing our every next step??? What was worse, we were misled into paying our taxi fare with a credit card which imposed an extra 15% fee when we could have simply settled it with cash!! Where is the justice in this world??!!

In two simple words: CITIBANK SUCKS.

***Do humankind a favour and spread this to all your friends!!!***