Consumer complaint received 2022-12-14
Company: BANK OF AMERICA, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
State: WI
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:
This is a heads-up about ethically problematic behavior by Bank of America 's credit card division.

I recently opened a card with them. I was warned by others that they have a habit of messing up payments and charging fees, so I set up my online account immediately and set up automatic payments as soon as I was able to. In order to set up automatic payments I had to first set up a payment source. BOA did the validation process of making 2 small deposits to my checking account ( and of course clawing them back ) and had me tell them details of those deposits to verify it was my account. Then I managed to navigate through BOA 's confusing website to set up automatic payments. I set it to pay 5 days before the due date to be sure the payment would not be late. This happened XX/XX/XXXX or XX/XX/XXXX, after I got my first bill and thus could set up payments. 

( Tangentially this card is where my debt is parked until I pay it down and I would have preferred to set up biweekly payments but there is no way to automate that on their website. When I start serious debt repayment in XXXX I will need to log in and schedule 26 payments for the year manually, which is one more annoying hoop to jump through. ) I also set up my communication preferences so that I would get e-mail notifications about my account. 

Imagine my surprise to log in last night ( XX/XX/XXXX ) and discover that my payment was 2 days overdue. The system said my last login had been XX/XX/XXXX, so automatic payment had been set up for nearly a month. I checked my e-mail and I had gotten a " your bill is due soon '' e-mail on XXXX, the exact day they were supposed to process an autopayment from a verified payment account. They did not send a " we didn't take your payment '' e-mail. They didn't send an " your account is now overdue '' payment. They were presumably waiting for the account cycle to close so they could lock in the late fee they created for themselves before telling me about it. 

I called this morning and EVENTUALLY got through the autoattendent/phone queue verbal harassment to a real live human. She credited me for the late fee and tried to tell me that when I set up automatic payments it told me that it could take up to a full billing cycle for automatic payments to start. Except I have no note of that anywhere and they did not send me an e-mail with that caveat -- and they had ALREADY validated their ability to pull from my checking account, which is the normal purpose of the 1-month waiting period. They just took a 1-month waiting period without telling me in the hopes of making money in fees.

Because the CS rep has no way to pull the payment herself, I had to go in and issue a payment myself to correct the lack of payment. Before I did that I looked at the scheduling center and did not see a future payment scheduled. After I made the payment, the customer service rep walked me through checking that autopay was turned on ( it was. ) I then asked her if they would actually process the payment correctly next month and she said they would and told me to look at " scheduled payments ''. The only payment listed as scheduled was the one I had just made to process today. She then claimed I should check back in 2 days after the billing cycle ends and maybe I would see a scheduled payment then. 

As a software engineer I am appalled by the idiocy of a system which insists on verifying a payment account when added and then pretends it can't do an automatic payment for the first cycle because it wants to re-validate it, and does not inform the customer of that. As a consumer I know a flim-flam when I see one.

BOA needs to do the following : 1. Correct the issue with the first month of automatic payments from verified payment accounts.

2. Correct their communication on their web site to clearly state " we have no intention of paying your bill for the first month. '' 3. Send a " you signed up for automatic payments '' e-mail with those limitations clearly stated. They send e-mail notifications for everything else but I don't have one for automatic payments. That seems to be deliberate.

4. Send a " late payment '' notification by e-mail within 24 hours of the payment deadline if payment has not been received, so clients have to opportunity to correct the issue before the billing cycle closes.

If they do not manage to get my automatic payment for next month scheduled by XX/XX/XXXX you will be hearing from me again.

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 monetary relief