Consumer complaint received 2021-03-16
Company: CITIZENS FINANCIAL GROUP, INC.
State: NY
Product: Mortgage
Sub-product: Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Trouble during payment process

Complaint:
I am filing a complaint against Citizens, the home loan company located in XXXX XXXX, VA. My complaint is for usury, or effective usury. I am also complaining about Citizen 's failure to communicate, and deception in their communications. 
Citizens has charged me {$3300.00} in late fees on a total shortage amount of {$6.00} which they failed to accurately notify me over a period of 13 months. These fees are irrational, unreasonable and construe usury. Further, I never got a notice, letter, phone call, nor secure message on Citizens.com to let me know I partially late ( for {$0.00} ) on a payment. Meanwhile Citizens has been charging me {$260.00} each month since XX/XX/XXXX for the short XXXX cents on each months payment. 
Further Citizens provided intentionally misleading accounting statements showing credit and made no valid attempt to contact me to let me know I was being charged these exorbitant fees. 
Lastly, I have been trying to resolve this situation with Citizens since the beginning of the year. Every time I call I am put on hold for hours, and sometimes I am not even given an option of waiting. They will call me back which is a period of more than 5 days. 
I have had a mortgage with Citizens since XX/XX/XXXX. From XX/XX/XXXX to XX/XX/XXXX I made an overpayment each month. Then due to a change in circumstances, in XX/XX/XXXX, I reduced my payment to the minimum payment. My monthly payment is {$5200.00}, however I reduced inadvertently to {$5200.00} because rounding on my computer was showing me just {$5200.00}. I would also like to note that, importantly, the payment of {$5200.00} was made on time, every time by automatic bill pay. It was never late. Also, I paid the outstanding balance immediately after speaking with the agent. Which basically was all the late fees that had accrued plus the total late amount of {$6.00}. 
Because of misleading statements and lack of contact from Citizens, I did not realize I was XXXX cents short on my monthly payment each until I got my tax statement from Citizens for XXXX. This is because Citizen sometimes showed a late fee and sometimes did not. Some months they showed as a fee and some months in parenthesis which implied a credit. I thought they were correcting Citizens own errors with their confusing statement. Each time I I thought they were issuing me a credit. The statement never had a plain XXXX sentence, or any sentence, that said You are {$0.00} late on your payment and therefore we are charging you {$260.00} in late charges. They never sent me a letter notifying me of this continual XXXX cent shortage and the monthly late fees accumulating. They never got in touch with me at all. They said they called me, however they clearly called a number which is answered by a person named XXXX XXXX who is clearly not me. They never followed up with a letter to say we can not reach you. 

Further, I look at my account the Citizen website from time to time and the fees were not clearly or correctly identified there either. Citizens shows the late fee in parenthesis which usually refers to a credit, not a charge. Moreover, even on their website they never put a sentence or alert to say ***you have been assessed a late fee. I use their secure messaging platform on their website and they also never sent me a notice on their messaging platform or a letter by mail. 

This is all part of Citizens plan to fraudulently make money. They clearly liked collecting {$260.00} each month on the XXXX cents I was short, and is evidence by the misleading way they issue their statements and their lack of valid attempts to reach out to me. 

In fact the first time these usury rates were clearly identified was on my XXXX tax statement. I contacted them immediately. Ironically, Citizen apparently waived this fee in XX/XX/XXXX without me even know so it didnt show on my XXXX tax statement. If they had Citizen had not waived the fee for the first month it would have appeared on my XXXX tax statement and I would have noticed this an entire year ago! 
After my accountant showed this to me I sent an email thru Citizens.com which no one had responded too. After a week I called the support number and spoke to an agent and a manger who both agreed that the {$3300.00} charged for the aggregate total of {$6.00} of late payments was egregious. They directed me to another team at Citizen ( the Research and Fulfillment Team ) to reach a resolution team for a credit. After several more attempts to reach them, I finally got a notice that they would waive one of the months late fees in the amount of {$260.00}. However, I believe Citizen owes me much more. They should be held to only charge a maximum late fee rate of 25 %, which is the maximum allowable amount in New York. 
You should investigate Citizens. Citizens Bank, N.A. ( NMLS ID # XXXX )

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation