Consumer complaint received 2023-07-12
Company: Freedom Mortgage Company
State: CA
Product: Credit reporting, credit repair services, or other personal consumer reports
Sub-product: Credit reporting
Issue: Problem with a credit reporting company's investigation into an existing problem
Sub-issue: Problem with personal statement of dispute

Complaint:
XX/XX/XXXX Dear representative of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I am submitting a complaint on Freedom Mortgage, my current mortgage company. 

I am a single mother of XXXX XXXX  who has dealt with extraordinary difficulties over the last decade. Despite these, I have worked incredibly hard to keep my financial world solid and stable. I have continuously held a good to excellent credit score and no late payments, etc. 
I have my own personal system for managing my finances and paying my bills which includes ALWAYS opting for hard copies and mailed hard copies of all financial documents and billing statements. 
This past year I filed my XXXX taxes early, and paid off and paid down debts to position myself for a home refinance or HELOC, etc. 

At the end of XXXX my father passed away unexpectedly leaving me solely responsible as successor trustee for the clearing, cleaning and sale of the family home, a huge storage unit, final arrangements, all of his personal and business accounts, etc. 
Throughout this same time, a family member with a substance abuse/addiction has been living with us to gain stability and enter a treatment program. Of course, that is all in addition to continuing working and taking care of my kids and household. 

In the month of XXXX ( XX/XX/XXXX at XXXX XXXX, to be exact ) I decided to check my Freedom Mortgage phone app for a convenient look at my account. Unbeknownst to me, this action automatically changed my billing statement preference to Paperless. The change was made late enough in the month of XXXX that I still received a statement in the mail for the month of XXXX, XXXX. The first electronic paperless statement was generated in XXXX for the month of XXXX. During this time I had also begun the application process for a home refinance. 

Due to my hectic life and without a hard copy mailed billing statement for the month of XXXX ( my regular, tangible reminder ), I paid my XXXX mortgage late. I honestly thought I had sent the payment. I sent the payment as soon as I realized the lapse, along with the next payment for the month of XXXX. 

I have attached the correspondence with Freedom Mortgage, including my first message and their response and my second message. I do not have a response to my second message, yet. The larger portion of this effort was made in the recorded phone calls to Freedom Mortgage. I do not have those but FM should if requested to produce them. I only have copies of messages from their online message center. 

In the first message I was trying to figure out how I had possibly missed the payment and requested Freedom Mortgage to remove the late payment mark from my account and credit reporting. At that time I did not know my billing statement preference had been changed to Paperless. In my phone call, they said if I could show my preferences had been changed by Freedom Mortgage, and not by me, they would be able to justify removing/redacting the late report to the credit union ( paraphrase ). 

My second message to Freedom Mortgage is after I had learned that the Paperless option for my account had been changed via the Freedom Mortgage phone app in XXXX. This was after placing no less than XXXX phone calls to Freedom Mortgage on Monday, XXXX, and speaking with several customer service representatives and their supervisors. I pushed for them to review their electronic records to find out exactly where/when/how my preference had been changed to Paperless. 

I have attached photos of the screen shots of the FM phone app and print outs of the same screen shots with notes. 

Upon opening the phone app, the first screen that comes up is the default for the Paperless option. It has the XXXX XXXX already set for the Paperless option but it appears that XXXX is supposed to actively select the Enroll Now button to the right to make the change.

It also states very clearly below that ... To enable/disable the paperless option, go to Statements. Any changes made will be visible ( they misspell it as visible ) within the next 24 hours. This leads you to believe that for any change to preferences, one would have to go to the Statements area of their account to change to paperless.

The reality is, the app changes your preference to Paperless without your actively choosing. It changes your preference setting when you leave the app page.

THIS IS Freedom Mortgage changing my preferences, not me!

It is easy to see how deceptive this is making it incredibly easy for consumers to end up with late fees or worse. Freedom Mortgage has no phone app or otherwise, giving the customer the benefit of the doubt.

I am extremely concerned this event will ruin my ability for a refinance. This is obviously time sensitive, even more so now with interest rates climbing. I now have to consider what damages I may incur from this if not corrected immediately. It may already be too late.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation