{"id":552,"date":"2012-10-18T13:51:27","date_gmt":"2012-10-18T18:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucog.org\/blog\/?p=552"},"modified":"2012-10-18T13:51:27","modified_gmt":"2012-10-18T18:51:27","slug":"too-big-to-fail-not-citibank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/2012\/10\/18\/too-big-to-fail-not-citibank\/","title":{"rendered":"Too big to fail? Not Citibank!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Citibank got a huge bailout from the U.S. government because it was supposedly "too big to fail". But in my case Citibank has already failed – at basic math and English. <\/p>\n

Several months ago I took out an interest-free cash advance with Citibank. As a ten year customer, I had a high credit limit and nothing charged on my card. All I had to do was make regular payments within the term of the loan (one year). \"Citibank At the same time, I had about $48 in cash rewards in my account, which I could not redeem until the amount reached $50. I wasn't too concerned about that, because as soon as I had the cash advance paid off I would be using the card again for some regular purchases, so my rewards balance would eventually reach the minimum redemption limit. Since I was making regular payments on time, I did not pay much attention to my monthly statement. Then all of a sudden one month my cash rewards balance went to zero. I was puzzled by that, so I checked the previous month's statement. Sure enough, it told me that because of inactivity on my account my rewards balance would be reduced to $10 the following month. However, instead of it being reduced to $10, it had been zeroed out. If that is an example of Citibank's math skills, it is no wonder they needed a government bailout. So I called the customer service line. I was told that there had not been any activity on my account. I replied by saying that what they apparently meant was that there had not been any new purchases, since I had been making regular payments and a payment credit was account activity. However, the person seemed to have difficulty understanding that. But I was assured that if I made some purchases within the current billing period, my rewards balance would be restored with my next regular statement. Since my cash advance was just about paid off, I made a final payment and made a couple of purchases, as instructed to do so by the customer service representative. When my next statement showed up, my rewards balance reflected on the percentage of the new purchases. I called a customer service representative again (this time the person was in the USA instead of a foreign country), and although sympathetic, the representative was unable to do anything. In my opinion, Citibank is so big it failed – to understand basic English and to understand a math error. Needless to say, I took my business elsewhere!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Citibank got a huge bailout from the U.S. government because it was supposedly "too big to fail". But in my case Citibank has already failed – at basic math and English.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-back-in-the-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}