A warning about dealing with Citi Card's in-house collection service:

Because they are still collecting for the original card issuer, not acting as 3-rd party debt collectors, (even if your card says Sears or Shell or whatever), you can not send them the standard cease and stop calling me letter, when I stopped answering their calls and tried that, they actually upped their calls on one day to 14 attempted calls in less than 9 hours, instead of their more normal 4 to 8 on an average day. They apparently also do not have to comply with many of the same restrictions placed on 3-rd party collectors, such as not calling you at work, or calling at inconvienent hours, or ringing your phone as many times as they can get away with, I've heard of stalkers who were probably less persistent than these guys. Because they were so unwilling to work with me, I was eventually forced to let all my Citi accounts go to default, just to finally get rid of these in-bred hillbilly's. Kentucky also appears to have very lax state laws regulating collections and conduct of collection agencies in general.

Citi has a large call center located in Florence that does all in-house collections for anything related to a Citicard account, like all the branded gas charge cards, Zales, etc. The reason these locally in-bred bastards will call 6 or 8 or 10 times each day is because they are not 3-party collectors, they are still collecting on behalf of the original card issuer (Citi), so they seem to think they can get away with a lot of illegal or abusive crap the 3-rd party collectors are not allowed to pull, or try to threaten you with. After the first fifty or so harassing calls, often once an hour, I told them to go to hell, and intentionally let my accounts go to default, just so I could get rid of these bozos.