Citibank Autopay Issues
October 2, 2008 – 5:38 am
I signed up for autopay with my two Citibank credit cards, and when I signed up the fine print told me that it would take about 45 days or so to setup. Being worried about missing a payment, I went online to make a one-time payment to ensure I wasn’t dinged with a fine (and a late payment on my credit report).
I thought I might be getting close to having autopay activated, and I intentionally paid both credit cards five days early, thinking that if autopay was in force the software would see my zero balance and simply skip this month’s withdrawal.
Well, I’m sure you can see where this is headed. My one-time payments cleared well before my due date. But Citibank still withdrew the funds a second time as part of autopay. Fortunately I had (just barely) enough funds in my checking account to cover the double payment, but I’m still upset that I had to pay my credit cards in advance. We also had some larger than normal expenses last month due to biannual insurance payments, so it may take me 1.5 – 2 months to get back to a zero balance on the credit cards.
The good news is that I know autopay is setup now, so I won’t have to worry about this being a problem in the future. Although I don’t think Citibank did this intentionally, I do agree with Dave Ramsey that “if you play with snakes eventually you’re going to get bit.” Thus far I’ve been willing to keep my credit cards and pay them off monthly, which has allowed me to maintain a reasonable credit score and earn a little cash back. If I ever do get stung bad however, I’d be fine with cutting them up (or freezing them in a block of ice).
Image Credit: Mike McCaffrey
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4 Responses to “Citibank Autopay Issues”
I don’t know about citi, but if you accidently make a double payment they’ll credit back the account. Especially if you double paid your bill.
By kevin taylor on Oct 5, 2008
This happened to me today and I’m furious. I charge my business expenses to my Citi card and don’t keep thousands of dollars sitting around in my non-interest-bearing checking account to cover both months. They now refuse to credit back my double payment and have told me it will take FOURTEEN DAYS to return the positive balance. Apparently the second payment they stole from me is now gone for the month and I am on my own.
I realize that this comment is very late on the post but I have every intention of telling as many people as possible that this happens and maybe, just on this incredibly long shot, Citi will actually consider informing their customers that AutoPay has been enacted when it is.
By Amber on May 20, 2009
Same thing happened to me. The confirmation when you sign up for autopay warns you of a duplicate payment possibility essentially in the same paragraph where they advise you make a manual payment to avoid late fees/interest. You don’t put two conflicting instructions in the same warning without some reviewer taking note. Makes you wonder what would have happened if you didn’t make the manual payment. Say 10% of folks who signed up for autopay were cautious and made the manual payment, now is that 10,000 people who got burned? 100,000? The first week alone Citi would have had enough complaints to “close the loophole”. A simple confirmation email saying “Congratulations Autopay is now set up!” would do, or an indication saying “Autopay will pay $X,XXX on such a date”. They also allow you to manually pay the last statement balance multiple times, so this isn’t their only flaw.
I don’t believe they programmed the site to double pay when people make the manual payment, and hold off on the payment to collect fees/interest from those who don’t manually pay. But I guarantee some folks sat in a conference room and reviewed the customer complaints and consciously decided this “bug” wasn’t worth the time/money to fix, especially since each time a customer was affected they either collected fees or had an extra payment on their books for a month. The only cost was customer support calls/emails, maybe refunding fees, and a few lost customers…that is for the folks who realized what happened, and the small fraction who were affected enough to care.
By Alan on Nov 5, 2009