Consumer complaint received 2021-03-30
Company: Affirm Holdings, Inc
State: CA
Product: Payday loan, title loan, or personal loan
Sub-product: Installment loan
Issue: Getting the loan

Complaint:
On or about XX/XX/XXXX, I made an online purchase for {$640.00}. When I was recently reviewing my credit report, I noticed that there was 1 late account on my credit report. This item stuck out because I have never had a late account in at least the past 10 years. As a result of this late account, my credit score was reduced by approximately 40 points. This will make it more difficult for me to get credit and increase the cost of any credit that I do receive. 

I noticed that the report was filed by a company called Affirm. I contacted Affirm and told them that I did not purchase anything from them. After sending the message, I noticed that Affirm had paid for an item that I purchased from a company called XXXX. When I investigated this matter further, I went to my bank account records, because I thought that I had paid cash from my bank account for the {$640.00} online purchase. I could not find a {$640.00} charge to my bank account. 

Not wanting to have my credit record damaged further by Affirm, I immediately paid the balance of this purchase to Affirm so that they would not continue to damage my credit. 

I contacted Affirm and told them that I do not remember having purchased this item using Affirm credit. However, I have noticed that Affirm does manage to somehow inject itself into the pay pages of items that I purchase. It was clear to me that I did not intend to have Affirm pay for my purchase. I did not have any need to use Affirm to purchase this item. 

After paying off this account, I went back to my phone text records and noticed that Affirm had quite literally bombarded my phone with text messages several times a day. Until I looked up this information, I was not aware of it because Affirm 's relentless harassment was so bad, the messages were marked as spam and put into a folder for future deletion. I do not usually review this folder because I usually don't have a reason to investigate spammers. 

After checking my text messages, I went into my junk mail/spam folder and Affirm showed up again. Once again, I would never have known that Affirm sent me an email unless I went into my junk mail folder looking for their message. However, I had no reason to go into my junk mail folder or look for a message from Affirm because I did not realize I had a loan with Affirm. 

As I said at the start of this message, I have never had a late account in at least the past 10 years. If I had intended to borrow money from Affirm, I would have paid this account on time. However, because I did not know that I had an open balance with Affirm there was no reason for me to be looking for messages from Affirm. 

I will be XXXX years old in about a month and I may occasionally miss things that I would not otherwise have missed when I was younger. However, I really don't remember having used Affirm to purchase this item and I had no reason to use Affirm to purchase this item because I had enough money to pay cash for this item. At the very least, I could also have used another one of my credit cards to pay for this item. For this purchase, Affirm would not have been one of the first payment methods I would have used. However, I am now finding out several months later, after having my credit score trashed by Affirm, that this purchase somehow ended up being financed by Affirm. 

I am sure that Affirm will allege that their system is ironclad and there is no way for somebody to make a mistake. However, in my specific case, a mistake was made. 

Perhaps this mistake was made because we have an overly aggressive company injecting themselves into transactions using aggressive online techniques that are especially confusing to senior citizens and can cause problems such as the one described in this message, to be made. 

Yesterday, I contacted Affirm, explained what had happened and they did not remove the bad credit report that reduced my credit score by 40 or more points. 

In my opinion, Affirm should repair any damage resulting from their aggressive online marketing tactics used in combination with their predatory customer targeting - acquisition schemes that create this type of financial problem resulting in this type of damage to a person 's reputation. We saw this type of aggressive, reckless marketing, predatory lending behavior during the mortgage meltdown in XXXX. 

In my opinion, Affirm should be held to the same strict standards that mortgage lenders are held to because what appears to be Affirm 's thinly regulated lending activities appear to be spreading throughout the internet like a virus and affecting tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, even millions of online consumers.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation