Citibank, Div. of Citicorp Air Miles, technically a bribe to consumers, paid for by Vendors, are a gigantic hoax, a rip-off of Vendors fees, and a consumer fraud. Sioux Falls South Dakota

Citibank is but one of a group of banks using Visa and MasterCard plastic to defraud Vendors through the use of bribes! "Air Miles" is the bribe. You (Party A) hold a credit card from Citibank (Party B), and they say to you, "Instead of cash or checks, use our card at each Vendor (Party C), and in return we will give you credit of "a mile air travel for each dollar spent." This is a gigantic fraud. Nothing is free. Someone pays. Here, Citibank (and MBNA, Wells Fargo, OFleet, Capital One) are charging the merchant for those "air miles." On each transaction, he pays a fee. Then, you are (temporarily) credited with those miles. You can lose them, you know. They can do all sorts of things with those miles, but in the meantime, you have helped them "shaft" the Vendors. Ken Stork is CEO of Citibank, PO Box 6000, Sioux Falls, SD 57117. Sanford Weill heads Citicorp, which owns Citibank. Write him at his NY office and complain. That was their aim in the beginning, to "shaft" the Vendors. Build their business by making the Vendor pay for it. A double cross by Citibank. A shafting by Citibank. A scam against the merchants by Citibank. They make billions, the Vendors lose billions. So do the cardholders who run up bills then cannot afford to pay. American Express=American Excess pulls the same scam. The Vendor pays 4% of the amount of the sale to American Excess. Ken Chenault is the CEO of American Excess. Write him at: 200 Vesey Street, N.Y. So far, 7 trillion miles have been credited to their trusting cardholders. You'd have to book fares to Mars in order to use them all up. The American air fleets can not fill those numbers, that's certain. That's a fraud in itself. It is a gigantic fraud, a hoax, a scam, and YOU and the VENDORS are the ones who get taken. To me, a company that scams its Vendors and its Cardholders like this has a close kinship with the old protection rackets in NYC in the 30's. It is a racket, no more, no less. Howard Solvang,, California