Consumer complaint received 2020-12-25
Company: SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL
State: TX
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:
On XX/XX/2020 I incurred a vet bill in 2 separate amounts. {$480.00} and XXXX. I signed up for a 12 month interest free promotional offer. This is XX/XX/2020 and the balances on these two charges are XXXX and XXXX. Its been 6 months and the balances have only gone down by minuscule amounts. I have paid way over the minimum amount every month. Now here is the main problem I am having. On XX/XX/2020 my pet had to have XX/XX/XXXX XXXX and I incurred a rarely large bill that is a fixed interest agreement. The minimum payment is supposed to cover this bill as well as the interest every month. For example. I made 2 payments in XX/XX/2020. One for {$250.00} and another for {$25.00}. A total of {$270.00}. {$31.00} was applied to the XXXX interest free promotional balance. Nothing was applied to the XXXX promotional balance. {$240.00} was applied to the fixed interest rate balance. I have been requesting payment allocations every month since the beginning of XXXX when I realized that they were manipulating my payments in a manner that would leave me paying interest on these interest free promotional balances. This is unethical and probably illegal. Despite my frequent requests they are not allocating my payments per my requests. I had another interest free promotional balance that has since been paid in full but it required multiple contacts with multiple people to finally be paid off before the end of that promotional offer. My complaint is they are applying my payments to the fixed interest account and ignoring the interest free balances. If you sign up for a 12 month interest free promotional offer you expect that a payment would be applied every month in order to be paid in full at the end of that 12 months. Syncrony is not following that logic. They went so far as to change my auto pay amount without my permission. Since they have refused to allocate my payments as requested I was making additional payments to get these balances down so I would avoid interest charges at the end of the 12 months. They subtracted my extra payment from my auto pay. Unbelievable right? For example. My auto pay is {$250.00} month. I made an extra {$25.00} payment and they reduced my autopay to {$220.00}. I will never have these promotional balances paid off by the end of the 12 months if they keep manipulating my payments in a manner that benefits them and not the consumer. I have documented request for payment allocations dated XX/XX/2020 thru XX/XX/2020. I have had other conversations with representatives before XX/XX/2020 but not documented proof. They claim it takes 2 billing cycles to allocate my payments as requested. Its been 4 months since I started this crusade to get my payments allocated the way they should have been done from day # 1. The last few documents are not as clear. My ink is running low but you can see I have tried to resolve the issue with Syncrony but have failed miserably.

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