Tangential to another thread, I recently asked a question about whether Citi cards allow limits on cash advances to be reduced to $0, effectively eliminating the risk of being asssessed any CA fees and elevated interest on any transaction that may unexpectedly code as a cash advance (e.g., instead of a service fee, such as with some bill-payment services that accept credit cards).
Without getting into the rest of the thread not pertaining to CA limits, according to one answer, Citi cards will still allow $0 CA limits as of recently. However, when I called about getting this for a recently opened Double Cash card, I again got a hard "no" here, similar to what I had gotten with earlier requests on other Citi cards from years back.
Am I doing it wrong? Do I just need to try again with a different rep? Is there a preferred way to request that my cash-advance limit be reduced to $0?
Those are basically my questions. Maybe that's all that's needed. For added context and reference, maybe useful for posterity, here's the post-mortem detail of my latest attempt:
I called the main Citi help line, dialed 9 for credit, entered the CDC card number when prompted, and transferred to a live rep. I asked to have my limit for cash advances reduced, preferably to $0, so that any potential cash advance would be declined. The rep told me that he'd never had anyone asking for a reduction (rather, he'd only dealt with requests to increase limits), and he referred the question immediately to his supervisor. Supervisor gave a hard "no" and said that I could only reduce the CA limit proportionally to the total spend limit, per the usual rule of 30% rounded up to the next $100. I have no reason to want to reduce my overall credit limit at this time, so I declined to do that.
The rep went on to discuss further that because my card has no PIN set up, I cannot withdraw cash from anywhere, and therefore would not be at risk of incurring any fees or interest for cash advance, ergo my lack of PIN is effectively a $0 CA limit. I was not convinced, and asked what would happen if any service fees happen to code as cash advance. The rep then backpedaled and said that he has dealt with people contesting CAs when they use their Citi cards to send money via Venmo, so simply having no PIN does not protect against and decline accidental CAs. I don't plan to use my card to send movey via Venmo, but I am aware that some service fees may unexpectedly code as cash advances, even if the actual accompanying payments do not code as such.
As a last-ditch effort, I told the rep that other card issuers do the $0 CA limits, and I was not aware of why Citi would not do same (I would never mention myFICO Forums or the like with card/bank reps). He went on to read a bunch of irrelevant lines of the cardholder agreement, as if that somehow explained why Citi could not do $0 CA limits (it did not), again repeating the hard no.
That was just my wanting to make sure that the people on Citi's end even knew what I was asking for. I get the sense that the rep did not know what he was talking about, and that I might have better luck talking with a different rep. Maybe same also for the supervisor.
I have had that experience in the past with other Citi issues--sometimes the reps are so clueless that they don't know what to relay higher up, but they also double down on whatever wrong information they're running with such that it's a better use of my time just to call again and talk to someone else. I just want to make sure also that I'm not somehow going about this wrong, calling the wrong number, talking to the wrong people, etc.
Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
