Citibank NA had a Non Resident Indian Bank Opening Offer in 2005 where they offered zero account balance accounts for Non Resident Indians. In November 2005, I applied for the account opening with a draft of £ 300 needed. They returned my documents as they needed more documents to confirm my residential address - even though I had a running HSBC account at the same address. They did not include my draft in the returned documents. On repeated calls I was told that they don't hold drafts from people whose application for opening account is rejected.On a concerted chase with HSBC, I finally found that the amount had already been withdrawn by Citibank.

I wrote to them in the first instance on 02/02/2006:

MY APPLICATION FORM HAS BEEN RETURNED WITHOUT THE ACCOMPANYING DRAFT.WOULD YOU RETURN THE SAME PLEASE AT THE EARLIEST OTHERWISE SEND ME A RESPONSE SAYING WHY IT CAN NOT BE RETURNED.I CANNOT EXPECT THIS KIND OF PATHETIC SERVICE FROM YOUR BANK.PLEASE RETURN THE ACCOMPANYING DRAFT ASAP.

THANKS

On 25 février 2006 12:43 I wrote:


Can you please provide me with the email of your departmental head, Does an organisation exist in this bank ?

Thanks

On 25 février 2006 I wrote:

IS THERE SOMEBODY LOOKING INTO THIS MATTER AND RETURNING BACK MY MONEY?

THANKS

This was follwed by multiple calls to them where they simply said they did not hold my draft and to check with the issuing bank.

I wrote back to them on 12 February 2007:

Citibank NRI Business
Citigroup Centre
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf E14 5LB
United Kingdom

Dear Sir,

I have been made to run pillar and posts to open an account with you. My initial request to open the account in November 2005 was not allowed and the application form was returned without the bank draft.After many communications through your phone line and emails.I was not given a clue as to what really happened with my bank draft passing the ball back to me saying that my documents were returned with the draft of £300.

After a concerted chase with HSBC involving taking time off my work and travel on numerous occassions - I have come to trace that the draft was deposited with another bank on 18-11-2005 while I was being continually told that Citibank did not have possession of my money.

I would like you to kindly refund me with my draft amount with interest to my account number ********* at HSBC Bank along with adequate compensation for the distress caused due to your pathetic levels of account opening customer services.

I have been made to run pillar and posts to open an account with you. My initial request to open the account in November 2005 was not allowed and the application form was returned without the bank draft.After many communications through your phone line and emails.I was not given a clue as to what really happened with my bank draft passing the ball back to me saying that my documents were returned with the draft of £300.

After a concerted chase with HSBC involving taking time off my work and travel on numerous occassions - I have come to trace that the draft was deposited with another bank on 18-11-2005 while I was being continually told that Citibank did not have possession of my money.

I would like you to kindly refund me with my draft amount with interest to my account number ******** at HSBC Bank along with adequate compensation for the distress caused due to your pathetic levels of account opening customer services.

To which I got back the reply:

Dear Sharique,

How are you?? Hope you are in good health.
We have been trying to get in touch with you. But the letters that we have sent you have returned back to us. We sent them to your L*** Road address since the same was mentioned on the envelope sent by you.

Please let us know which address do we need to send the draft to??

I replied on 21 April 2007:

Hi,

Please send the same to Sharique ****, Flat K, *** H*** Road, ******
At this point I am looking for additional payments to cover for interest accrued in the period the amount was retained by you and damages in the form of my work time lost spent chasing the amount through emailing, telephoning you and the draft issuing bank and physically visiting the draft issuing bank and your branch in Central London.

regards

On 24 April 2007 I got the following response:

Dear Sharique,

Since we did not receive any reply from you earlier, we have dispatched the cheque along with the interest lost to your India address : *****, New Delhi - *** which was mentioned in the letter that you had sent to us.
A letter confirming the same will be sent to this address mentioned below

On 01 June 2007, I wrote:

It is more than a month and I have not recieved anything from Citibank at the address you have sent the cheque.

Please check.

On 03 July 2007, I got the following message:

I have put a tracer for your cheque to India. Am awaiting a revert from them.

I'll keep you posted once i receive any initimation from India.

On 2007/12/12, I wrote:

Any headway with the payment..Or do I consider that Citibank needs a part of my earning to function through its precarious existence.

Cheers

On 03 January 2008 18:05, I wrote:
Has there been any headway in providing me back this payment.

Thanks

No response was recieved and I continued on calling each time a new person at the call center would make me recall the whole story. I recorded the names of few individuals I got on their customer service. For example:


on

3/12/08 S Bismillah

10/7/08 S Patel

On 11/11/08 I got the following reply


This is with reference to your email dated October 23, 2008.

We were unable to respond to your query within the time-frame promised, as it required investigation.

We regret the inconvenience caused.

We confirm that we will be able to compensate an amount of INR 2386.85 towards the interest amount during the period of November 24, 2005 to November 10, 2008.

Please confirm us the disbursement mode through which the funds need to be transferred for us to do the needful.

We assure you of our best attention at all times.

On March 26, 2009 I gave them my physical address for delivery of the cheque.

No cheque was received.

I called the same officer again who said she wanted me to forward emails so that she could investigate and resend me the cheque

On April 13, 2009, I got the following email:

This is with reference to your email dated March 26, 2009.

We apologize for the delay in responding to your query.

We have arranged to send a draft for GBP 32.00 to the below mentioned address.

*****
***
**

Please be assured that you will receive the same at the earliest.

We assure you of our best attention at all times.

23/04/2009

I am still not in reciept of any cheque. They had agreed to provide me a paltry compensation- which is even now in thin air .

Can you please advise me what to do in this instance. Citibank NRI Services are not regulated by UK FSA but they offer their services to Non Resident Indian customers in many countries.

Citi NRI is the worst website ever built. For one the login is kinda goofy. You have a complex 16 digit login ID that you can mask with a user id. However your user id is mapped to your login id on each computer (Basically I can have as many user ids as I have computers.) You delete cookies and you are back to the drawing board. The password you gotta type in using your mouse using some goofy onscreen keyboard. Then you go to a cluttered screen with over 200 links. God help you if you want to find anything there. If you want support you have to send an email from the support link, however if you send an email from your mailbox you will never get a response. After a week or so somebody responds without reading your question. Keep in mind the response never appears in your mailbox (Your mailbox always shows empty). Once you go to the support link and see the inadequate message, you are required to respond to that message (They call is a query. I guess they think their employees are like databases you execute queries against). However make sure you don’t click on any link before you respond; because once a message is read, it is automatically removed from the support link taking away any ability to respond

ACH transfers take from 3 weeks to 6 months (They take money out of your source bank account on the same or next day but take from weeks to sometimes 6 months to credit any information into your account).

The other scheme they have going on is they turn your account into an inactive / dormant status for inactivity (meaning moving money in or out of the account) thereby locking you out of your account and trapping any cash you have in your account. If you want your account to be operational, they ask you to physically go to a branch in California or to one of their offshore offices in India. If you don’t you will not have access to your cash. By law they are required to notify you prior preventing you from giving you access to your account. They get around this by changing your account to an inactive status first which prevents you from transacting on your account (even though you can log in normally and look at your balance and stuff giving you an illusion of normalcy). After a further status of inactivity they change it to “Dormant” totally preventing you from having any access to your account.

Going to their exchange rate, they consistently give you 1-2Rs (2-4%) lower than market conversion rates. They make most or all of their profits from skimming off the top when compared to SBI and ICICI rates.

Finally in terms of support it is impossible to find a telephone number to their support desk. If you ever need to call CITI NRI Helpdesk their number is 800 248 4674

Overall CITI is a very unethical bank. The most unethical I’ve seen so far especially in their international dealings (US Regulators and guarantees have forced them to maintain a certain level of honesty and transparency in the US). Their website is the least user friendly of all websites and CITI NRI is the worst by far of any banking site. It’s a mess