Citi illegally discriminated against Armenian-Americans, feds say
CBSN
Citigroup for years illegally discriminated against credit-card applicants who the bank identified as Armenian-American, according to U.S. financial regulators.
Officials with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said Wednesday that Citi trained employees to deny applications from people with last names ending in "yan" or "ian" — the most common suffix in Armenian last names — as well as applications that originated from Glendale, California, which is home to a large Armenian-American population.
Bank workers also hid their wrongdoing by purposely not taking notes or recording the conversations they had with Armenian-American consumers, the CFPB charged in revealing the findings of an investigation that focused on credit-card applications Citi received between 2015 and 2021.
