Sears CitiBank Sears MasterCard Customer harrassed by merchants bank due to their "Sears CitiBank's" own mistakes Hoffman Estates, Illinois

I'm sorry to hear about your situation. I could see how frustrated it is for you and your wife to get into this mess. This could happen to anyone when you deal with a corporation or big organization. Sometimes, the problem is that the person on the other side (works for the corporation or organization) does not know what to do when certain problem occurs. As a result, the problem escalates to an even bigger problem as in your case.

I used to have the same type of problem (dealing with corporation) with my bank when I applied for automated mortgage payment. I checked my bank account whether the money was taken out a day after the due date, and there it was, nothing was taken out. I contacted the bank right away and found out that they did not do my application correctly. As a result, I had to resubmit my application all over again, and the problem was fixed without any penalty.

Next time, you need to be more careful on spending with (any) credit card. They are out for profit, so you must keep track of what is paid and not. In your case, you forgot about it until you got a call from them. Even though, the address that they put in was unusable (PO Box) and the person who applied for your wife should have told her, a part of it is still your responsibility to know about when there is no billing. Also, when you know you owed any of this, you could immediately pay it off instead of dragging it out by telling them to send the bill before you can pay. Corporations do not care about what you want them to do, but you are expected to follow their rules regardless their incompetent of staff or system.

So I hope you will take this as an (expensive) experience and not have another problem again with any other corporations. Good luck.

Why didn't *you* contact them earlier? You knew that you had an oustanding charge on a new credit card. You knew you never recieved a bill or the card in the mail. Didn't that worry you a little bit? Not recieving the bill has never been a valid complaint to not paying a credit card. If it were, I would stop paying my credit card now and in 6 months call them and say "Hey I never got a bill so I don't owe anything"

You still owed the money, you knew you owed the money, you didn't pay the money so yes you will get a mark on your credit. While citibank does bare some responsibility, you share in that responsibility by not following up with them either. I"m sure the fine print on the application and paperwork you recieved gave you information on how and who to pay. You are clearly intellegent and understand how credit works, you should have been proactive to protect yourself.

After getting some much needed rest, my wife started making yet another round of calls to Sears and CitiBank. Peggy? Yes, he lives at both call centers.

We'll start with Sears customer service. As predicted, they denied any responsibility. In speaking with a CitiBank representative, we learned that the Sears credit card application system won't accept a P.O. Box as the billing address. With that fact on the table, I wonder how many other consumers who only receive mail from the U.S.P.S. via a P.O. Box have ran into a similar problem of not receiving their statements or bills in a timely fashion?

CitiBank stated that they mailed the bill out but it was returned as undeliverable. They did this in December, January, and February. At no time did CitiBank ever call us on the telephone to verify our address or, allow us to make a payment via telephone. We know that CitiBank had the correct telephone number due to the harassing telephone calls we've been receiving from them for most if not all of February.

To add insult to injury, last Friday my wife walked into a Mitsubishi Car Dealership and purchased a vehicle. She put $13,000.00 in cash down plus has an $8,000.00 trade-in (ya think she couldn't afford to pay CitiBank their measly $70.00?). We just learned today from our Credit Union that CitiBank put a mark on my wife's excellent credit rating. This means that she will not qualify for the low 2.99% interest rate and will probably end up paying closer to 8% due to CitiBank and Sears inability to correctly mail their bill to a proper address, an address that Sears has no trouble mailing there other bill to for the last 12 years.

That's right, CitiBank put a mark on a new consumers credit rating without even taking the proper time to research the problem or call the consumer in an attempt to fix such problem.

How's that for customer service (Peggy) from a greedy bailed-out bank that has a known track record for commiting accounting fraud?

These people should be thrown in jail. What they do is dishonest. My wife's excellent credit has been defamed by two lazy corporations that have all but forgotten the golden rule.

As for the measly $70.00 we own CitiBank? The new credit card was paid off in full earlier today via telephone. The card has been chopped up and you can probably guess what part of the human body that both Sears and CitiBank can kiss...