Citi shuts down my accounts

Introduction

Well, it had been a long time since my last shutdown.  I was going strong for a while there.  So what happened?  I went to make an online purchase this morning and my card got declined.  I then logged onto the mobile app and everything looked fine.  I had credit available.  I then logged onto the site and saw this:

 

 

So what happened?

Well, for the past 2 months, I had been cycling my DC card’s 35K limit.  I was running 25K a week through a certain promo that I’m sure you’ve read about.  Thus, I was doing 3X on the card.  I knew the risks of cycling this hard.  I had asked a few HH if anyone was cycling Citi, and a few people said that they were.  Thus, I went HARD.

 

Other possible reasons

I can tell you that I wasn’t doing any kind of anonymous payments or payments by phone.  Nothing fishy; I was just spending on my ATT (not even cycling that 10K CL.)  Now I know I had 2 HP’s recently due to my Tesla 3 loan, so if they soft pulled me, they would have seen that.  I didn’t carry any high balances on Citi or any other cards, so it was almost definitely due to the DC cycling and/or those recent HP’s.  I hadn’t applied for any cc’s lately either.

Oh, I did close my Prestige card last week and I saw the -$450 when I logged on.  MAYBE closing the account put eyes on my account.  I doubt it though.

 

About those TYP

As soon as I saw my cards were shut down, I tried to log into thankyou.com and couldn’t log in. FFFFFFFFF.  Luckily, I was still able to get into my TYP on my main Citi login.  You see, unlike Chase, Shiti will just nullify your points upon shutdown (or that’s what I last heard – may be different these days, but I wasn’t going to take a chance.)  Once I got to my TYP site, I transferred out all 360K TYP I had saved up.

The shutdown did happen a few days before my statement closed, so those bastards did “keep” $2,000 of my DC rewards.  Maybe I’ll ping Alex to try to recoup that hard earned money.

 

Conclusion

So was I sad at the shutdown?  Not at all.  I was more pissed that my Tesla 3 got delayed again.  As you can see, I hardly used my TYP (probably hadn’t transferred any out in 3+ years.)  I had amassed 1M AA miles that I hardly use these days.  So I’m not sad.  I didn’t really care much for their cards.  Crossing fingers my wife’s account is saved, but most likely they’ll get her next.  I transferred her 80K TYP out just in case though.  Do I regret what I did?  Ehhh slightly.  Shiti is usually a lifetime ban, and I probably would have earned more points in my lifetime than this one-time gain.

18 comments on “Citi shuts down my accounts

  1. 1) What is Alex’s info. I got shutdown by Citi and wondering if I can get my 100k + points from them in small claims or thru arbitration
    2) They also confiscated around $100 in Costco cashback rewards.

  2. Any chance you can give at least a vague hint as to which promo you were taking advantage of? If you prefer not to, I understand, since I usually like to discuss the lucrative promos privately.

      1. Ah ok. Any tips for maximizing that promo? I have 3,000 rent I can pay through Pastiq, but unsure how to really take advantage beyond that.

          1. If I had a home, maybe. But for a regular city-dwelling renter with no car and no house, not sure there is any real solid way to take advantage I guess.

            I could prepay as much of my rent as a I want, but that would mean floating all of the funds so I couldn’t get too crazy

      2. Hi Phil, How did the Plastiq MC no fee promo work? I read that just for the first $500 is free free? Or a higher amount is fee free?

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