Of course we all know that big banks and credit card companies are a very forgiving lot. NOT.

Miss a payment by a few hours and you’ll find your interest rate doubled, your fees tripled and your house burned to the ground. Well maybe not burned to the ground, but Bank of America has been known to TP the trees of borrowers who couldn’t make their new higher minimum payments. And I have heard rumors of shit-filled bags set on fire and left on doorsteps by clean-cut men seen leaving the scene of the crime in armored cars with the Wells Fargo logo.

So we should be just as forgiving when it turns out that the folks at Citi printed the Social Security numbers of customers on the outside of envelopes it mailed to 600,000 customers in late January.

Citibank says that there is little or no risk because the numbers were not explicitly identified as a Social Security numbers and they were part of a larger string of numbers that resembled a mail routing number. That being said, now that the story has made national headlines, the criminal identify theft community has unanimously agreed not to pull the SSN’s from that string of numbers and use it to ass-rape the credit of Citi customers. They said it would be just too easy and would reflect poorly on the integrity of their industry.

But credit card companies don’t have such high standards.  Instead of lowering their customers rates or something more noble * and costly * Citibank said that it decided to notify the customers and to give them the option of enrolling in six months of no-cost credit monitoring. That’s got to cost Citi tens of thousands of dollars. How will they ever recover?

So the bottom line is that customers need to be perfect or face potentially devastating changes in their card agreements (which Citi has profited from to no end) but the bank can make a major screw-up that can damage their customers for years and escape with little more than a mea culpa. Seems fair. NOT.

The fact of the matter is that I have multiple credit cards, and Citibank has always been the most aggressive in playing the shell game to squeeze very penny they can from me. But this is the last straw. I’ll be cancelling that card and never doing business with these incompetent thieves again.

Good riddance.

*except in the mailroom.