Citigroup NRE account within 24 hours for USA NRIs - not my experience

Citigroup promises to open your account within 24 hours , but it took more than 20 days to open my NRE account and i am still waiting for the account number, check book, ATM card etc.   I just received an e-mail indicating that my account has been opened.

Its online application submission is redundent, it may help CITI when creating your account, but does not help you at all.  You fill the application and submit it, and then Citi asks you to print the application and send it along with the required documentation.  Its online tool has some issues as well.  The other frustrating thing is, you need to notarize each copy of the documentation.  If you cannot find a notary at your work, you are looking at spending $10 per signature.

You need to then mail the application and the documentation to a local NRI services center, and they will then send the application to India (i think), and then the account opening process starts.  Overall, i submitted my application online on March 12th, and then mailed the application the next day to CITI's Santa Clara office.  I received the application back with a yellow sticker stating that my name is not exactly matching the passport.  Your name must EXACTLY match that on your passport.  The application guidelines does not tell you anything about it.  Anyways, i corrected that and send it back in overnight UPS (return label was attached).  By then, it was 18th.  Then onward, i constantly pinged CITI employees for updates. 

Then my account was finally opened on April 6th.  The e-mail directs you to goto a link and enter the reference number (online application submission will yield you a number) and password etc to retrieve the account number, but it did not work.  It just told me that my account opening process has been initiated.  I had to wait until the DHL courier to come from Chennai.  It finally reached me on 9th, and opened to find that i did not receive the PIN numbers.  Anyways, long story short, i called their 1-866 number twice and finally reached an officer who helped me with creating online access.  Then i attemepted to transfer some money to another CITI account in India.  It failed again and gave an error that states that i have no permission to transfer money.  I called CITI again and was on the phone close to an hour and half (got disconnected twice) to told that i need to send the error message to their standard info e-mail. 

I called its Santa Clara NRI division and talk about the 24 hours opening deal.  They do not aware of this and told me that it is impossible to open a NRE account in 24 hours.  The officer promised me to look into the advertisement posted on Citi's website.  It has been more than a week, but the ad is still there - now in much bigger font and box.