CitiFinancial Auto Keeps Deducting Payment On Zero Balance Loan, Triggers Overdraft Fees

Marc’s monthly budget just exploded into a mess of overdraft fees thanks to CitiFinancial Auto’s negligence, and now he’s not sure how to get them to actually do anything to fix it.

He writes:

I had a car loan for two years with CitiFinancial Auto. I never had a late payment and was set up on Direct Debit from my BoA Checking Account.

Last month I traded in the vehicle on another car, at which point the loan was paid off and I have verified that fact with CitiFinancial Auto.

My issue is that on the 9th of this month they still took out my usual payment of $478.72 via Direct Debit even though the loan was already payed off. Upon contacting them I was told that they would issue me a check at the end of this month. I told them that I couldn’t wait that long, and I won’t even go into a rant about what would happen if I owed them money and told them that!

Anyway, the customer service representative them told me that if I faxed over a running copy of my bank statement along with my CitiFinancial Auto account number, Bank of America branch address, routing number and my account number to a Team Lead that maybe they could put the money back in.

It’s now been one week and they have done nothing. I have my monthly bills closely planned out as all of my bills are on direct debit, and today my checking account went negative, which will incur an outrageous overdraft fee from BoA, and I have two more bills coming out before I get paid on Friday which will result in three overdraft fees for a total of $105.

Is there anything you guys know of that I can do to not only get my money back that was wrongfully taken but also get them to cover my overdrafts that were a result of their screw-up and failure to correct it? Thank you!

Marc, you can try to find a number at CitiFinancial. Does anyone out there have a number he can use to talk to someone who can actually do something?

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