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Bucks Blog: My Tryout of Citi’s Price Protection Service

Awhile back, I wrote about a new service that Citigroup offers on its credit cards called Price Rewind. It lets cardholders register purchases, and then searches for the same items at lower prices. If it finds one, it refunds you the difference.

I happen to have a Citi credit card, and this week I received an e-mail with this message in the subject line: “Your recent purchase may be eligible for a better price.”

I was curious. What recent purchase?

It turns out that the message wasn’t referring to a specific purchase. Rather, it was a pitch for me to give Price Rewind a try, to see if perhaps something I had recently bought might be eligible for a refund.

I was mildly annoyed at the somewhat misleading e-mail, but I decided to try out the service anyway. I looked through my most recent online credit card statement to see if there was anything I should enter for a price check.

This brought to light some drawbacks with the service. For starters, the line items on your credit card statement aren’t itemized. The details of the purchase are on the original receipt, which you must have in hand to enter the necessary information. I generally don’t keep receipts for smaller ticket items, though I do get some receipts electronically.

So the first issue is that if you want to use the service, you have to make sure to enter the product information soon after you buy the item, before the receipt goes in the trash (or wherever it is that lost receipts go).

I did, however, happen to have a paper receipt handy for a small refrigerator I had recently bought from Home Depot, for $359. (It had been a difficult item to find initially, because it had to fit in a confined space and so was a bit of an oddball model in terms of size.) So I entered the product information into Price Rewind’s search engine, and got — nothing. Several other items under the same brand came up, but not the specific model I had purchased.

I contacted the program’s customer service line, and a representative asked me for the product information (brand and model number) before putting me on hold, apparently to search Citi’s list of eligible items. She couldn’t find it either. She said that didn’t mean that it was ineligible, just that it wasn’t on the list. She advised me to wait a couple of days and try again, since new items are often added to the database. Or, I could search for a lower price myself and then submit a claim form on my own.

Well, sure I could. But that sort of defeats the purpose of having the system search automatically for you. Generally, I look around for the best price ahead of time and then, after I make the purchase, I get on with life. I don’t spend a lot of time hunting for lower prices anymore.

So it seems that the service may work better for bigger-ticket items that are widely available.

A Citi spokeswoman said that about a quarter of registered purchases over $100 have been eligible for a refund and about 38 percent of registered purchases over $1,000. The average refund is $80. Eligible items include vacuum cleaners and televisions, as well as designer jeans, shoes and luggage.

Have you used Price Rewind or other price guarantee services? What was your experience with it? Did you get any money back?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/my-tryout-of-citis-price-protection-service/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Citi Data Theft Points Up a Nagging Problem

Even more striking is that similar data breaches have been occurring for years — and the financial industry has failed to prevent them.

Details remain scarce, but the disclosure of the Citigroup breach on Thursday quickly turned into a debate on whether the banks and major credit card companies had invested enough money to safeguard the personal information of their customers.

“They’re not at all on top of it,” said Avivah Litan, a financial security analyst at Gartner Inc. “It’s almost shocking.”

In Washington, the finger-pointing has already begun. Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, said on Thursday that she planned to call on some banks to strengthen their authentication procedures when customers log onto online accounts. That’s on top of new data security rules that federal regulators are completing.

Lawmakers, meanwhile, said they were outraged that Citigroup waited since early May to notify its customers; some are preparing legislation.

Representative James R. Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat, said he was “shocked and disappointed” to learn of Citi’s delayed disclosure. “They knew the customers’ data was potentially exposed in May and only now are they telling them about the threat,” he said. “Being more forthcoming is essential.”

Consumers, meanwhile, are feeling increasingly vulnerable amid recent reports of data breaches at big companies, like Lockheed Martin, Epsilon and Sony.

A. J. Angus, a 25-year-old Google employee, was put in double jeopardy. On Thursday, he learned that his Citi credit card data had been stolen. Only a few weeks earlier, he learned that personal data on his Sony PlayStation 3 was compromised.

“You have to be vigilant,” he said, adding that he periodically checks his credit report and looks over his transactions almost daily on a personal finance Web site.

On Thursday, Citigroup began notifying about half of the 200,000 affected customers that it planned to replace their credit cards after it discovered last month that hackers had gained access to its computer systems. The bank said that the thieves obtained customer names, card numbers, addresses, and e-mail details.

Social security numbers, expiration dates and the three-digit code found on the back of most credit cards were not compromised — a move that security experts say makes the exposed cardholders less likely to become fraud victims.

Neither Citigroup’s debit card business nor its online banking operations were breached.

“Citi has implemented enhanced procedures to prevent a recurrence of this type of event,” the company said in a statement.

The intrusion is not all that unique. Over the last six years, there have been 288 publicly disclosed breaches at financial services companies that exposed at least 83 million customer records, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center.

Credit card industry officials say security issues go to the heart of their brands and they are trying to keep up with ever-more sophisticated criminals.

“We’re not dealing with 14-year-old hacker kids,” said Steve Elefant, the chief information officer at Heartland Payment Systems, which overhauled its security measures after the systems it used to process credit and debit card transactions were hacked in 2008. “We’re talking about 21st-century bank robbers — sophisticated, organized criminal gangs, located mostly in Eastern Europe and the U.S.”

Making matters worse, nearly every step along the payment chain is outsourced from the time a card is swiped to the time a monthly statement arrives, leaving plenty of openings for enterprising thieves. Security is further hampered by a patchwork of data protection laws and regulatory agencies, each with limited mandates.

“We need a uniform national standard for data security and data breach notification,” said Representative Mary Bono Mack, a California Republican who is pushing for legislation on better consumer safeguards. “In the meantime, regulators need to do a better job of being a consumer watchdog.”

Tara Siegel Bernard, Riva Richmond and Nelson D. Schwartz contributed reporting.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=f5ec1251b3ecae6d752d066ae311c687

Bucks Blog: My Tryout of Citi’s Price Protection Service

Citi Data Theft Points Up a Nagging Problem

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