Consumer complaint received 2018-02-17
Company: WELLS FARGO & COMPANY
State: IA
Product: Mortgage
Sub-product: Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Trouble during payment process

Complaint:
On XX/XX/XXXX, I received an unsolicited phone call from someone claiming to work at Wells Fargo. The person said there was a problem with our upcoming automatic payment draft in XX/XX/XXXX and asked me to provide our bank account and routing number. 

This phone call occurred the day after XXXX. I was in no position to give out our bank information through an unsolicited caller. I expressed my concern to the caller and then went online to wellsfargo.com to check our account after hanging up. Everything looked in order. Our bank account information had not changed in years. I sent Wells Fargo a secure message online and expressed my concern for what I believed to be a phishing call. 

Our payment went through online in XX/XX/XXXX but never was reduced in our bank account. About a week after the payment online was posted, Wells Fargo sent us an email stating the payment could NOT go through. I went online and tried to re-enter our same bank account information and it said it was already on file. I then deleted our information on file and tried to set up a manual electronic payment from a savings account. I doubted it would go through and also re-entered the same original bank account information and tried to set up a manual payment. 

Eventually both payments went through. Again, Wells Fargo did not explain why manual payments could go through fine but it was our fault / our bank 's fault for an unexplained error in pulling an automatic payment. Upon request, Wells Fargo returned the payment from the alternative account, leaving just one payment made for XX/XX/XXXX. 

I scheduled a manual electronic payment for XX/XX/XXXX and it just recently went through. Wells Fargo has yet to acknowledge its error or lack of responsibility for the XX/XX/XXXX phone call that did nothing to accept responsibility for the problem. 

In a letter dated XX/XX/XXXX, Wells Fargo send me a letter saying that they have reviewed our complaint and said that since they told us the call in XX/XX/XXXX was legitimate, we were warned of the problem with our automatic payment. Therefore we had no reason to be frustrated or upset. 

Wells Fargo is a huge company that acts without apparent care for an individual mortgage payer. We have never missed a payment and try to pay extra whenever we can. It feels like they are being deceptive, using practices like unsolicited calls around the holidays that an average consumer would be wary of, and taking no accountability for why their system can still not set up an automatic payment for a bank account that had worked just fine for years. 

We asked for some type of financial compensation / credit to our account for the inconvenience. We also asked that no negative credit reporting be done on our account. 
While they ignored the former request and promised the latter, I think this company needs to be reviewed again for deceptive practices. Thank you.

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