Citibank – Citibank will not release $143,000+ monies from my mother’s brokerage account, and they terminated 2 of my business accounts without cause.

Citibank will not release $143,000+ monies from my mother’s brokerage account, and they terminated 2 of my business accounts without cause.

History: My name is Mark Anderson, I am the youngest son of 92-year-old Dolores Rita Anderson (Dee/Mom), the surviving spouse of the Anderson Family Trust dated 1990. I also am the President of Papago, Inc. and formerly the Managing Member of Common Sense Insemination Products Co., LLC, a single member Nevada based LLC (now closed, partially due to Citibank’s recent actions)
While I am not sure if you are this complaint falls into your wheelhouse, I need to begin canvassing attorneys to find the best fit to help solve the following matters.
My 92-year-old mother recently moved to the Philippines to live out the rest of her life with my wife and I in the Philippines on January 19th. My wife is a Dr. (Vet/surgeon), my sister-in-law a registered nurse, and my mother-in-law a retired midwife. We have the requisite facilities and capacity to offer her 24/7 medical care as needed; in fact, we are in the process of building private retirement community on 20 acres offering assisted living and monitoring. The primary building my mother will live in will be 20K sq. ft., wheelchair friendly with an elevator to the second and third floors, and surpass her living conditions formerly in San Ramon, California.
Since my father’s passing in 2004, my mother has had an open invitation to live with us and my extended family across the pond. Upon visiting her in April of last year, it was obvious she could no longer take care of herself, and I stayed to monitor her condition and assist with her daily needs. It was also obvious, even with my brother living across the street, she was suffering from extreme loneliness.
Month’s prior to my arrival, my brothers Glenn Anderson and Gregg Anderson tried to sell Mom’ home and place her in an assisted living center which was completely against her wishes. I have been told, the brothers even wanted to list her house “themselves”, and sell it as is in disrepair, simply to get the listing commission and funds from a fire sale; even though neither of them are involved in real estate... Mom showed me a for sale by owner sign in her former sewing room left apparently by brother Gregg. Glenn lives across the street from her and Gregg lives in Colorado.
Mom has accused the two brothers of elder abuse in the past (a number of times), and since my visit when they learned of her accepting our invitation to move to the Philippines for care, they completely abandoned her and have not called or visited in over 6 months. My wife and I, and my extended family have consistently shown compassion and concern toward her wellbeing, while my brothers have looked at her as a burden and cared more about themselves selfishly.
Said brothers were first in line as successor trustees for the Trust, and I was listed as third. Mom has since changed the order (actually removed my brothers entirely) via a codicil naming my wife and I successor Trustees and beneficiaries of the Survivor’s Trust portion of the estate.
Brother Glenn, who was tasked with maintaining her asset(s) profile, did not update any account information since 2016. Many of the companies had merged, were renamed, or bought out so locating her assets was somewhat of a struggle for me. What is truly sad is, brother Gregg in Colorado used to be a CPA, and the other brother Glenn is worth countless millions. Both brothers let my mother live her life thinking she was on a limited fixed income; she was actually afraid to cool and heat her own home thinking she would run out of money. Her estate is worth approximately 2.5mil pre-tax, so ask yourself why they would allow this to happen?
When I very recently became aware of the value of Mom’s estate after reviewing a spreadsheet my late father provided brother Glenn, mom formally engaged my corporation Papago, Inc. to assist in locating, consolidating, and liquidating her assets to use for self-insurance medical assets in the Philippines. Our goals, my wife and mine, is to protect my mother and let her enjoy the years she has left amongst people who will love her and cherish who she is… we also just got her a little Maltese puppy to keep her company.
As such, once her assets were located, we established new personal and brokerage accounts for her at Citibank to consolidate everything in one place. I was offered control over her funds via bank issued POAs (under the direction of my mother), as allowed for in the Trust Agreement, and the engagement was notarized and provided to Citibank early on. Assets from Chase Bank, and Charles Schwab, Fidelity, etc. were either transferred to the new Citi accounts and/or surrendered for their cash value and deposited with Citi.
Our goal was twofold; one was to send money to the Philippines in advance of her flight on January 19th to have funds available upon her arrival, and the other was to maintain assets at Citibank for future use. Unfortunately, the transfer vehicles Citi has in place would not allow for us to move my mother’s money as they promised. While we were successful in partially doing so, the transfer process for personally wiring funds to the Philippines was overly frustrating and severely broken.
Seldom, if ever, was I able to successfully transfer funds online and we were forced to visit the branch repeatedly to have Citibank send the funds. I explained this was not acceptable on many occasions to everyone at the branch (as did my mother), since we would no longer be in country to continue said process. In addition to personal bank visits, we were trapped in Citibank’s endless verification system and had to literally spend HOURS on the phone with India, the Philippines, Argentina, and South Africa, only to find out days later the transfers had been cancelled and were again asked to come into the branch.
FYI, I had two company’s banking with Citi for approx. 7 years, and never had issues on the business side.
Repeated trips to Citibank for my mother, even though I had power of attorney over the accounts, led to an extreme amount of stress and exposure to sickness since most of the bank employees we were forced to deal with were out sick many times. My mother made multiple requests IN PERSON, IN THE BRANCH to close her brokerage account and have Citi issue her a check, but her request was not denied. I went on line, and tried to transfer the funds to a checking account we could access. While I received confirmation the transfer was successful, no money ever moved. We sat in of one polite Citi employ Estefany, and my mother gave the same instructions to someone back east to close the account and issue her a check too. Said person promised the funds would move the next day Friday, or no later than the following Monday.
One month prior to our departure, my mother came down with pneumonia and was hospitalized 3 times…
In the San Ramon Branch, Mariam Shair the branch manager, Rita Lee, and Michael Chien were our contact persons. Lars, Nang based in a Houston office set up most of the paperwork but every one of these people made serious mistakes at every turn. To try and shorten this grievance letter, all my mother’s personal monies were returned to her, except the $143,000 and change in her brokerage account. None of the people responsible for opening this brokerage account have helped in any way in retrieving the funds.
It got to the point just prior to our departure where I was forced to inform Citi that legal action would result if they did not release the funds; time was of the essence and they knew we were leaving the country. In response, Mariam told me I threatened one if their employees (which did not happen), and both the branch manager and Rita Lee instructed me to come to the branch, whereby they would issue checks for all my mother’s accounts. In a malicious and spiteful manner, they also told me they would terminate my business accounts which were clearly separate legal entities based in Las Vegas, NV in order to release the funds.
I arrived at the bank while my mother was still in the hospital, and Mariam continued to deny us the $143K in the brokerage account. So they terminated unrelated business accounts as a condition or release my mother’s funds, but then still did NOT release her brokerage monies.
Per an earlier phone discussion with the Sheriff’s office, I told all parties at San Ramon branch I would call the police. Mariam thought it would behoove her to call them first, so the police arrived on the scene as a complaint against me.
As I said earlier, I went to the bank per their instructions, with every expectation this nightmare would be over and ALL monies would be returned. Two officers arrived and we talked at the teller’s window for probably two hours while they closed our accounts and issued all monies outside of the brokerage funds.
All they would tell us is there was a hold on the account. Nobody knew why, when, who, or how the hold was put there. I informed them this was causing my mother undue stress, worry, and scaring her since she would be relying on her assets for continued medical care in the Philippines; and this in my opinion qualifies as elder abuse by Citibank. Someone at Citibank knows what is going on, but nobody will tell us.
I filed a police report and called Protective Services many times over a few day period, but amazingly enough, I was told this was a civil matter… Personally, I find it unimaginable and unconscionable that banks have the ability to unilaterally withhold elderly people’s money without offering any explanations as to why or how to resolve the problem. As it stands, communication has ended with Citibank and we have no idea how to pursue this outside of the legal system.
IF Citibank had acted with professionalism or honesty, we would not be so frustrated. But the malice and vindictiveness shown towards me, and my companies, exceeds any normal business practice and I feel the individuals involved should be personally named in any action if this escalates to litigation. Upon researching this on the internet, I would hope the people named could be held personally liable for damages in this matter as well as Citibank, along with punitive damages…
Since we could not get a social worker to visit my mother first-hand to hear directly from her mouth, Protective Services suggested I call 911 to lodge a complaint. I did and spoke with officer Crocket; a record of said call should be on file with a reference number SR 23.00116 on 1/15/2023. I do not yet have a copy of the transcribed conversation…
It should also be noted that every time I discussed this with neighbors and other associates, many people have had similar experiences with banks overreaching their authority. We entrust these institutions to hold our money, but we have never authorized them to act in these manners.
I will continue looking into filing complaints with oversight committees and other agencies in control over banks, but we need to get this resolved as soon as possible.
We have been fighting with Citibank for many months over their ineptness and unusable systems. For them to simply expel us and keep over $143K is hardly a civil matter in my opinion. They have in effect stolen my mother’s money…
What I hope you glean from this introduction is, the actions taken by Citibank to my knowledge from stemmed from branch level personnel. Mariam Shair made the decision to expel us for their own shortcomings, and her intentional malice and spite should be painfully evident when terminating accounts just set up for my mother’s (and my) Social Security Payments and my mother’s small pension from a school district. We did nothing wrong, and we certainly nothing to deserve this kind of vindictive attack.
I am looking for someone strong and aggressive to pursue this, especially if you look at all the other people complaining about similar things. There appears to be a systemic breakdown in the USA’s banking sectors where somehow the banks feel our money is theirs to control. It is not. Frankly speaking, after what Citibank put us through, I strongly feel they owe us more than the $143K and change. I would like them to feel some pain, something akin to what they put us through.
They apparently feel my time does not have a value… It does, but more importantly the stress and anxiety they inflicted on my mother was wrong on every single level. They need to be taught a lesson and we hope you share our disgust at the way this is playing out.
For whatever reason these people might think they are protecting my mother, THEY have victimized her by their own actions. My wife and I are saving my mother from the rest of the family and taking care of her for the rest of her life. That is a huge commitment on our part, and one which we are happy to provide. The following link is my mother’s Facebook page, I created it so she could keep in touch with her USA based friends and video chat over Messenger… https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100086677573396
There has been no undue influence, no coercion, no intimidation, no duress, and the choice to move to the Philippines with my wife and I was 100% my mother’s choosing. She expressed these feelings in private to Citibank and many others since she made her decision, so why can’t these institutions simply mind their own business and stay out of our family matters. They should be penalized for what they do, and that is what we want your help with. If they suffer no penalty for their actions, they will continue to do this to others as well.
We look forward to any advice you can offer to resolve this, and whether or not I with POA over my mother’s account can return to the states if this goes to court. If this does not get resolved, I will need to represent my mother’s issues as well as my own. My mother cannot make the trip again; it takes 24 hours to get from point A to point B, and we simply will not put her through that to solve this abuse of power. https://www.complaintsboard.com/citibank-b109952

Respectfully,