Citizens Bank They've made the process of inheriting a car as much of a PITA as possible Providence RI

December 23, 2020, my father passed away. He left me his car (TOD) which had/has an auto-loan financed by Citizens Bank.

Back then, I tried to contact them to see what the next step was, manage his account, and probably just pay off the loan entirely (he'd been paying $500 a month since 2014, plus he'd had a 2013 Focus before that that was recalled and traded in; I figured there couldn't have been much left of it).

Dunno if they were suffering COVID staffing shortages or something, but I couldn't get in touch with anyone. Tried several phone numbers, sent letters to two different addresses, Facebook, email...no one was home. To be honest, I wasn't all that eager to risk a DMV visit at this time, anyways (the vaccine wasn't out yet), so I just left about 10 grand or so in the bank account where the auto-payments were coming out of, and they stopped being taken out somewhere during the summer of 2021.

Fast-foward to a few months ago: I'd kind of just set the car aside and mostly forgotten about it, so I finally decided to go register/transfer/whatever the car I'd paid two years worth of taxes on. The license office told me I would need either a lien release or a form showing I'd taken over the loan, so I attempted to contact Citizens again.

Well, it took a decent amount of waiting on hold, but I finally managed to get in touch with someone, and they told me they would send me the lien release letter...which then didn't show up even well after the promised 7-10 business days. Two more conversations with them took place, with the same promises, and the same disappointment. I also sent another letter to their HQ (this time, Priority mail w/signature verification, so I know someone received it this time), which was once again completely ignored.

On my most recent attempt, I was going to demand they send it in some way where there's a tracking number I can look up, but they started saying completely different things from before (like I'd need to fax them an "executor's letter"; it's TOD, it doesn't go through probate, why TF would they need that?), then they clammed up completely.

Asked to talk to a supervisor, who put me on hold for a while, only to come back and tell me I needed to call the number for their "Asset Recovery" department and press "option 2." I called the number just to scout out what I might be getting into, and the automated message literally called themselves the "Repossession Department." Now I'm thinking I'm gonna get totally screwed if I even talk to someone there without a lawyer.