Killing my grandmother

I’m writing about the experience of my 97-year-old grandmother. She needed a checking account so I opened one with Citibank for her online. I provided her landline, my cell phone, and my email address. She’s never used a computer and wanted me to take care of all the online banking. We would have opened a joint account but that requires you to go into a branch in person, something neither of us was willing to do during the massive Coronavirus outbreak here in LA since I’m a Type I diabetic and she’s old as dirt. We never got a card or pin in the mail but didn’t think we really needed it since we had an account number and she got a checkebook. She transferred every penny she has into this account. A few days after this she went to stay with her sister in another town because of her failing health. Immediately we started running into problems with them wanting to call her house and give a pin every time we tried to do anything. They wouldn’t use my cell phone or by email or verify us any other way and didn’t care that she wasn’t home. We had to resort to arranging a time her neighbor could go into her apartment and answer the phone to text me a code whenever we wanted to send $20. I spent many hours with Customer Service during this time explaining why this was a problem, but everyone told me a different thing. One person told me this verification business would go on for two weeks, another told me two months, another told me it was indefinite. One told me that it would stop once I activated the card and, when I said I already had, told me I had to get a new card and activate it again. We ordered a new card, waited for it to arrive activated it, but nothing changed. Another CSR told me we needed a pin and then this would stop, but we requested a pin be sent out three separate times and for some reason never got a single one. I finally got one to set up a pin with me on the phone, but again nothing changed. At one point a CSR told me she had opened a case for me and that the “higher-ups” would be in touch to help, but the next guy told me that’s not even something they do. My grandmother and I were hung up on more times than I can recall, and not just when we were being nasty. It’s like they’re all trained to just hang up on you when they get tired of talking to you. At their suggestion, I also went through a massive amount of hassle to get external accounts verified with trial deposits so we could make online transfers, but they blocked every single one. Later they told me it’s because the external accounts were not hers, which of course was the point of having external accounts linked in the first place. They also suggested I added ‘payees” and then I would be able to make wire transfers for free, but after going through that whole maddening process I learned that there’s a $25 fee every time you want to do that. As bad as all this was, it got much worse last week when I got an email out of the blue saying that the User ID had been blocked and I had to call to unblock it. When I called they told me they couldn’t help us unless we had someone at her house answer the phone to get the stupid code, so we had to wait days until her neighbor could go back and await their call. That day we set up a time when I could take an hour off work and the neighbor could too and called them up, just to be told that they couldn’t call with a code after all. This time they told me we had to go back to the house and call from the landline. I explained that we were out of town and couldn’t go back just to use that phone, but every single employee I talked to just told me they wouldn’t do anything else. During this time, we couldn’t pay bills, couldn’t pay employees, and were racking up late charges and overdraft fees all over because Citibank wouldn’t let us use our money. We had no choice but to pack up and go back to grandma’s house just to use the phone. This is all very difficult for her since she can barely move and we don’t have a car, but they would give us no other options so we packed up all her things and her wheelchair and got a very expensive Uber ride. When we got back yesterday and tried calling I was told they had to verify by calling me back on that number. So I hung up and waited twenty minutes. I called again and explained that no one had called me back just to be told that since it was “in the works” with that guy no one else could help me. After an hour I really had to get back to work so I called yet again and went through all the rigmarole of the system and being on hold for twenty minutes and being transferred back and forth for the third time, finally to end up being told by one of the managers that they can’t verify us over the phone at all anymore and that grandma has to go into a bank with two forms of ID. She does not have two forms of ID. She does not have a car. She’s 97 and it’s painful for her to get to the bathroom, let alone into a bank. She’s in the group with the absolute highest risk of dying of COVID (I’m in the second) and we’re in the highest-risk cities in the US. I told this to so many CSR’s, explaining that they’re literally asking us to risk our lives before they’ll give us access to the account, and were repeatedly hung upon. Not to mention that many of their branches are closed because of the pandemic and we’ll have to go miles away. We don’t know what else to do, so tomorrow I have to take yet another day off of work, get another extremely expensive Uber ride, sit in LA traffic for an hour, go inside a bank and risk our lives, probably just to be told that she needs a passport or something before they’ll give her her money. I honestly feel like they’re putting her in an early grave. I’ve never seen her so stressed out and I’ve felt like I’m having a mild heart attack for about two weeks straight. She was actually crying on the phone with them yesterday and they hung up on her. I tried to make this as succinct as possible and, long though it is, it doesn’t even go into all the problems we’ve had just trying to use a simple checking account.