Until Citibank shows us some love...

By: JP Smith | Published: July 20, 2009

Categories: Internet, Business

I've been a Citibank customer for well over a decade, just a little longer than I've been a Linux enthusiast.  Now, you're probably asking what one has to do with the other.  Well, it seems that Citibank doesn't think that I should be both. 

Let me explain.

More often that not, I ocassionally take time on my lunch break to check my accounts or pay bills (my work computer is a Windows PC) but, there were times I would access the Citibank site from my home computer (Linux PC) and could not click into any input fields or click on any links. At first, I thought it was the browser but, I use Firefox on my work Window PC, also. 

I have a Windows partition on the machine so, I could have rebooted but, I would have to stop working on other things just to reboot and check one website -- not worth the hassle.

Yesterday, I decided to see if I was the only one experiencing this issue.  Not only did my search inform me that I was not alone in having this issue, it informed me of something else -- Citibank seems to have taken consicious steps to make its site inaccesible via Linux.

I don't have the hard facts why.  From the various sites I visited, I get the impression that the reps that the callers spoke to could not give consistent, or even good, rationales for blocking access from Linux PCs.

Then, I saw that someone had found something to get around this issue.  Apparently, Citibank blocks my access based on my browsers User Agent identification.  In a nutshell, this tells a server that your request is coming from a particular browser on a particular operating system.  Well, developer Chris Pederick gets my gratitude for coming up with his User Agent Switcher plugin for Firefox.  After installing this, I was able to set it to appear as if I was browsing from Internet Explorer.  After doing so, amazingly enough, I was able to log in to my Citibank account.

Shame on Citibank for such a bad policy.  However, until this changes or do business with another bank, I have the User Agent Switcher plugin to help me out.