Consumer complaint received 2018-09-10
Company: SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL
State: CO
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem when making payments
Sub-issue: Problem during payment process

Complaint:
After several months of dealing with Paypal & their new method of hierarchy payment system, I am at my wits end with their misleading statements & mishandling of my payment allocation & need to file a complaint toward how my payments are being handled on special financing deferred interest purchases. I made several purchases on Paypal 's 6 month special financing promotions as well as one purchase that was made with their 24 month 'easy pay ' promotion. Up until a few months ago, all of my payments have been allocated properly until the 24 month promotional purchase was made. After accepting the 24 month easy pay promotion, I noticed that my payments, which normally would allocate towards the earliest expiring promotions were being almost entirely allocated towards the 24 month promotion. I caught this when I was reviewing my statement several months ago & contacted Paypal by phone immediately. I spent about 2 hours on the phone & I was told that Paypal had started applying payments using a new method & unless the customer calls & makes specific allocations, the majority of the payments would first apply towards the 24 month promotion. This made absolutely no sense to me & it's concerning as I feel that this is a way to collect a hefty interest on expiring promotions from consumers that may be unaware of Paypal 's new payments allocation method. Offering a 24 month interest free promotion yet applying a payment made in it's entirety towards that promotion when there are other interest deferred promotions coming due within a span of a few months is a very questionable practice. I have been calling every month after making my payment to make sure that they are being allocated properly & yet, each & every month the payments have been allocated improperly. Every month after diligently calculating & asking for proper allocation, I am left with more of my payments going towards the 24 month easty pay promotion as opposed to paying off the balances on special financing purchases that are rapidly coming to expiration. So each month I am having to figure out their mishandling of the requested allocation & having to work off of their allocation since they refuse to go back to the previous month to correct their mistakes. The 2 customer service reps that I spoke with in the previous months were equally baffled as myself at their new hierarchy payment process & agreed that this is a very suspicious way of handling the payments. During my very first conversation with one of their reps, I explained how to process my payment allocated even though I felt this was ridiculous waste of time. When the next statement came, I noticed that the payments were not allocated the way I had asked it to be. I contacted Paypal & spoke with another rep to allocate the new payment & also to go over previous mis-allocation. I spent again over 2 hours on the phone trying to get this fixed & payment applied properly. I have been extremely diligent in making my payments to ensure that my balance is paid off by expiration date but the way Paypal is allocating the payments is highly suspicious & according to the reps that I have spoken with, I am one in a sea of complaints they are receiving about the same issue. I contacted Paypal again today to allocate a recent payment & was told that yet again, the previous month 's allocation was not applied properly. Because I did not want to deal with wasting anymore time each month on this, I had made a payment to take care of all previous promotions leaving me with just the easy pay plan but due to their mis-allocation from the previous month, I am left with balances on promotions that are coming due yet my 'easy pay ' promotion with the most amount of time left to pay a minimum payment has been reduced almost in half against my requests. Today 's call was especially disturbing as I found out again about the mis-allocation & after being told repeatedly that my latest payment would allocate correctly with a remaining balance, when I asked to be transferred to a supervisor & going over the payment & remaining balances, he confirmed that the rep that transferred me to him had once again mis-allocated my payment & gave me completely wrong information on the balances. I believe there is either a complete mismanagement and/or an attempt to defraud consumers of interest fees with this new system that makes zero sense & is so convoluted & time consuming that I'm sure most people are just giving up & paying interest fees that they would not have incurred if the payment application was being handled properly. I would appreciate an investigation into this matter as I am certain that there are many others like myself stuck in this very same situation.

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