Introduction
There has been lots of posts lately on FT and other forums about Citi shutdowns of late. It’s not like a ‘wave’ like the OBC Blue Wednesday wave, but the number of reported shutdowns have increased in the past week or two. We haven’t figured out what is the root cause – churning too much or MS’ing too much or possibly even due to too many debit card payments. Anyway, while we guess at what is happening at the moment, I figured I’ll write a story about how a reader of mine got shut down in October 2015 by Citi:
The Citi shutdown story by my reader this past October (unedited)
Bad news for me today: my first ever major shutdown by Credit Card Issuer.
History: I had a Citi DC shutdown 5 weeks ago, I had called and paid $500 off with GC as I had done many many times, except this time my balance was actually $0 and they never informed me of that. When I checked online a few hours to make sure everything was good, I realized that card was closed and $500 payment was back on my gift card. I had a lot of questionable activity on this account so I assume when physical eyes saw my account, they had to shut it down.
Fast forward to today: All my accounts AND my wife accounts are closed on Citi with no explanation. 4 cards each. Luckily I only lost about 2,000 TYP and $40 in cash back stuff between everything, but still sucks. When I called Citi, I got the write to the “Office of the President” response…
Thoughts on the reason for closures: I don’t know what exactly caused the shutdown, but my guess is once something happened where someone looked at account, it was an easy decision.
Questionable Behavior the last 2 years:
1. Applied for 5 Exec Plat Cards in 6 month time frame per person last year
2. Opened Citi Gold Checking and Savings – Put $40K-$50K Credit Card load on each account and cancelled accounts within 3 months.
3. Total of 32 credit inquiries on my EX report the last 2 years (19 last 12 months)
4. Heaving MS on Citi DC cards – (NW Buxx, GCM, GC.com, Simon, etc)
5. Hundreds of $500 payments made on on Citi DC cards using GCs.
6. Over a hundred $1,998.12 Check Free Bill Pays made to the accounts
7. Citi Business & Citi Personal Credit Card application submitted every 6 months on average for past 8 years (churned AA Plat Pers & Bus 3 times last 4 years, in addition to the Exec Plats I did last year)
Basically, it’s been a fun ride with Citi for 8 years. Time to say good bye. Hopefully I can receive good standing again in 1-2 years..
Lessons Learned
Haha I don’t know what the lessons learned here are. It’s like asking what charges should be brought against “El Chapo.” As you can see, this reader was a HH (Heavy Hitter.) He is also the one who keeps reminding me, “If you aren’t shut down, you’re not hitting it hard enough.” =)
With the recent shutdowns though, I’m actually very afraid of my TYP. I may just transfer them out to Singapore and hope I use them up in the next 3 years.
This was actually an inspiring post about what’s possible. Notice how few of the things he’s doing are heavily blogged about, and the numbers he’s doing. Hundreds of $500 “debit card” bill pays and $2000 Walmart bill pays means hundred of thousands liquidated with citi alone the past few years. I’d hate (actually love) to see his OBC activity statements. People don’t realize what can be done in this game if you keep your mouth shut and play it smart (and the blogs do too). The lesion learned? Exactly as you said. Keep on going until you’re shut down, find a cooperative relative with a clean SSN, and keep going.
You mean his FORMER OBC statements since clearly he got the axe on that on Blue Wednesday. I was averaging $2500 of rewards per month just due to the time I wanted to put into running around to grocery and drugstores.
$2500 a month = $65k-$75k a month. Not bad. (I know a couple of pretty hard hitters that didn’t get the axe. They missed a few people. But yeah, former OBC statements, being as the 50k limit has kicked in for almost everyone by now.) If you got shut down, that’s a good sign about what you were doing. 🙂
Dumb question – what is DC?
Double cash
Consider moving points to EVA too.