Consumer complaint received 2023-06-28
Company: Atlanticus Services Corporation
State: NY
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem when making payments
Sub-issue: You never received your bill or did not know a payment was due

Complaint:
Aspire Credit Card is a company that makes it intentionally difficult to pay your bill. They dont send you a notification when your bill is due, their website to pay is constantly down, their app is also constantly down, and even when its working it makes me change passwords that I know are correct. 

My payment was due XX/XX/. I tried to use the website or the app to pay, however, both were down. Every single time I tried to use the website it would end up not even functioning, and the app would just stay stuck in loading screen every time I tried to log in. 

Since it was past XXXX XXXX I wasnt able to call them to make the payment. So I had to wait until XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX to call them so I could make the payment online. They payment came with a {$41.00} late charge and even though I told them the reason was because their website was down, they still told me theyd reverse the charge as a one time courtesy????? 
I couldnt pay because their own systems were down and they charged me for it??? And then acted like they were being nice for reversing the charge? 

While trying to log in to my account XX/XX/XXXX, the website would constantly tell me that my email and password was incorrect. I use the same password for everything so that didnt make sense to me, but I went to go search my email to see if I could find where they may have sent me my account info before. When I searched my email, I found that exactly a month ago, when I was trying to pay, I had the EXACT same issue! Wasnt able to log in and had to reset my password. 

When I looked up the issue online, I found a lot of other consumers had the same problems I did, going back years. The website never worked, they never got notifications of upcoming bills, the app never functioned, they couldnt pay their bills for those reasons and had to get charged interest or late fees because of it. 

I looked through my email again and noticed Aspire had sent me a feedback request a few weeks ago. So I decided I was going to leave my feedback for this company in their reviews. What really upset me is that when I tried to rate it one star, nothing happened. Two stars, three stars, nothing. If I rated it four or five stars, I would be linked to a website to leave a review on their page. 

That made me think this was all intentionally by design. They purposely made a website that functions poorly and an app that never works so they can make their customers miss payments and pay late fees as a result. 

When I spoke to both the representatives working there and they didnt understand why I was so angry, I asked both of them if they would use a card from this company knowing their practices and working for them everyday. Unsurprisingly, both of them were silent when I asked them. 

It seems as if the intention of the company is not to provide customers with an opportunity to build credit, but rather take as much money from them as possible in fees and interest, by designing a business that makes it borderline impossible to pay your bills on time.

Company public response: Company believes it acted appropriately as authorized by contract or law
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation