Consumer complaint received 2022-01-15
Company: SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL
State: NY
Product: Payday loan, title loan, or personal loan
Sub-product: Personal line of credit
Issue: Problem when making payments

Complaint:
On XX/XX/2021, I signed up for a {$9500.00} XXXX interest-free installment plan on CareCredit, which is administered through XXXX. Automatic monthly online payments were set up, therefore the balance ought to be just above half of the {$9500.00} at this point. Instead, it's currently at {$8500.00}. 

Upon looking into this, every month there appears to be three transactions : - The first says " AUTOMATIC PAYMENT - THANK YOU. '' - The second says " INTEREST CHARGE ON PURCHASES. '' - The third says " XXXX XXXX XXXX. '' The first is the only one I ever consented to. The second is interest even though I enrolled in an explicitly no-interest plan. The third I researched, and this page https : XXXX informs that this is a scam based in XXXX. 

I called Synchrony, and they said that XXXX XXXX is a program where the customer pays a fee prorated on the outstanding balance then under some circumstances of hardship can have some of the money reimbursed. First of all, this sounds too good to be true ; where is that safety money coming from? Moreover, I don't remember consenting to this XXXX XXXXy program, and upon asking for documentation of myself signing up for this program they dodged the question and failed to provide anything legitimate. 

Synchrony told me on the phone ( after having to ask the question over and over while they beat around the bush and answered with extraneous information ) that the two extra payments I was seeing every month were indeed going away from me, not to me. Please refer to the attached PDF. If the money is going away from my account : 1 ) Why is it that the automatic payments have a negative sign ( i.e. the most recent one says " $ XXXX '' ) while the other two don't have a negative sign next to them? If all three of them are payments being taken out of my account, either all of them should have a negative sign or none of them should. 
2 ) Why is it that we're almost a year in yet the balance is nowhere near down to half of the {$9500.00}?

I asked these questions on the phone, and the receptionist kept dodging the questions and trying to distract me, and when I started to get to the bottom of the matter, I was forwarded to " another department '' multiple times. This is not rocket scienceall of the questions I was asking can easily be answered by one person at the company ; it doesn't take three specialty departments worth of information. They continually neglected to answer my questions adequately and gave me the runaround, until at one point I was on the phone with one of the receptionists and cut through the fake answers, and she hung up on me. I tried an online chat, and upon asking questions that were getting to the bottom of the matter, the agent abruptly ended the chat. How dare they take one penny of my money and not provide straight answers. 

At this point, it was becoming suspicious that this company is a scam. So I conducted some research, and many forums people tell stories of being scammed by them. One particularly reputable forum is the XXXX XXXX XXXXXXXX which their profile ( XXXX XXXX XXXX ) has one out of five stars based on nearly a thousand ratings. 

The transfer was coming from my main bank, XXXX XXXX. I explained the situation to them, and they said they would look into it, and presumably took some action. Synchrony then sent two texts and one email in less than 24 hours. I called them and told them to inquire XXXX XXXX, not me, about this. Right afterward, they disregarded my instructions and contacted me directly again despite being told not tothis is called harassment.

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