@everyone
If you have one of these charge cards, be careful! We have had one of these charge cards for ~ 9 years. We live off our charge cards. And they have debited our brokerage acct to pay them in full every month.
A few weeks ago, one charge that was supposed to be a automatic debit to this charge card and we got a notice that it was DENIED! I got that resolved and then I got a couple of emails saying that there was a problem with an auto debit with two different companies and gave me a phone number to call to clear things up. I picked up my charge card and called the number on it and was told that there was no problem with our charge card.
Out of precaution, I asked them to just replace our charge cards. It took about one week, but we got new cards in the mail. Within a couple of days of getting those new cards, they had been compromised, two separate charges, one done in Hong Kong for almost $500 for some service that could reload prepaid phones and I don’t remember what the other one was for – but the charge was for a few hundred dollars.
Cancel those cards and request a new set of cards. Took about a week to get those charge cards. Get the new cards and send the numbers to our lawn service. If we pay him for the entire season upfront, he gives us a 10%-12% discount, but the bill is still close to $1,400 for the entire season.
Now, Citi declined the charge. So I made a phone call and in theory, they told me that they had cleared up. The next day I told the lawn service to reprocess the charge, and one again the charge was denied and I get another fraud alert. Once again promised that everything was good to go and customer service asked me if I wanted her to turn off any fraud alerts on my cards, to which I agreed. I told the lawn service to enter the charge again and once again it was denied. At this point I was up the “ladder” the fraud and the customer service person told me to have the lawn service resubmit the charge. I told her that they need to UNDENY the charge. The CS person kept saying she was sorry for any inconvenience, but she could not do that.
I told them I did not wants excuses, I just wanted them to do their job… and I was through with Citi bank, and hung up. I already have new charge cards coming from a different bank and should have them within a week.
I have never had any other business dealing with Citi Bank and after this, don’t plan on changing that in the future.
Filed under: General Problems
Also, the irony in allowing charges to go through for charges initiated by foreign entities, but not for the ones you gave verbal authorization on was not lost on me. If these financial institutions are indeed attempting to implant precautionary security measures, then they have a long way to go yet. Whatever the case may be, let’s hope they get it down sooner rather than later.
Interesting. My husband just went through something similar with his debit card. The bank denied everything he had set up for autopay. He called to ask them to allow it to go through. Then they told him they’d already sent a new card, but the tech astoundingly decided to activate it while he was on the phone with my husband, which meant the card he had in his wallet wouldn’t work anymore. Of even greater concern, just anyone could take the card out of our mail and use it by running it as credit or making purchases online. The guy didn’t even ask, he just told him he had activated it. So my husband had to call his bank directly and they flagged the card for fraud so it couldn’t be used, then issued him a new one at the bank. I cannot for the life of me figure out why a tech with the security department would activate a card that was in transit in the US mail. If you’re on the security team, you should be acutely aware of how absurdly unsafe that is. I just had a package delivered to the “wrong house” about a month ago. The post office told us there was nothing they could do about it even though they knew where the package had been left. Cops told us the same. So someone else ended up with the items I had ordered for free because they claimed not to know anything about the package after dodging calls from the Post Office for an entire week. Luckily, I was able to file a claim with the sender for a full refund. If it were financial, I highly doubt it would be so easy to deal with. We didn’t want to find out how difficult it would be to handle if someone had gotten ahold of his debit card because the mail carrier put it in the wrong box or someone felt a card in the envelope. I tend to wonder if they’re implementing extra precautionary measures due to the series of data breaches last year, but dang, what a major pain. I am very sorry to hear that you had to deal with a similar debacle and to an even greater extent at that, Steve.
I went through that when a person with a card scanner lifted my info. It is a nightmare.