Consumer complaint received 2020-08-01
Company: LoanCare, LLC
State: VT
Product: Mortgage
Sub-product: VA mortgage
Issue: Trouble during payment process

Complaint:
I don't know how to categorize my complaint, as it has built over several interactions, but simply put I believe that XXXX XXXX XXXX, and/or Loancare ( subservicer ) is handling my account in a predatory manner, intended to generate consistent fees, and hamper my ability to dispute them. I am worried about ongoing damage to my credit, and frankly do not wish in any way to give financial support to what seems to be at the very least an unethically managed company. I have been able to successfully reverse at least some of the spurious charges, but I am worried that there are likely fees that I have missed, and I don't actually know what sort of hits to my credit I may have suffered as a result. 

I have had a persistently poor relationship with XXXX since my loan was sold to them, but particularly since Loancare began to be the subservicer of my loan. My mortgage had been sold once before, but the first two companies did not have any issues as far as I could see. Over the last few months the situation with Loancare has become an unworkable risk for me. During XXXX, I was laid off when my employer shut down operations due to Covid-19. There was significant financial confusion on my end at the beginning and I had a late payment due to an overdraft. I did remedy the payment within days of the issue. After looking further into it, it appears the late payment ( my one and only ),  was a result of mismanagement on my end, not an actual shortage of funds, so it was quickly resolvable. I am not sure exactly how it happened but over the course of my conversations with Loancare, as I was attempting to investigate what went wrong with the payment, I was placed on a forbearance plan. I did not request this. 

I should say, I am missing most of the specifics from the many phone conversations I have had in attempts to remedy these issues. I would like to request the XXXX and Loancare provide me with recordings of any phone calls regarding my account. I have not requested them yet, honestly because I am worried that the recordings could be simply erased in an effort to deprive me of evidence in a complaint. Loancare also appears to go out of their way to make contact difficult, as I will discuss more later. My hope is that by filing a complaint, I would be more likely to avoid their standard attempts to brush me off or get me to simply give up and accept the fees. 
I did not wish to be on a forbearance plan at any point, particularly because I feared that there would be unforeseen repercussions and complications. Again, I don't actually know if it was even discussed with me, or if I was automatically placed in forbearance due to some trigger that I don't understand. In any case I DO specifically recall being told by Loancare that I could maintain my automatic withdrawals on schedule so as not to fall behind on payments, which I was still in solid position to continue making on schedule and without interruption. I made the payment by phone, and attempted to reinstate automatic payments. I was led to believe that there would be no issue with that moving forward. 

As another aside, I should note, that automatic payments online are one of the very few options to pay your mortgage through this company without paying a fee. For example they charge {$12.00} per payment over the phone even if you use the automated phone system. They XXXX it up to {$15.00} if you do it through a representative. Obviously if you have an issue with your payment and need a quick resolution, you don't really have much choice. While I'm sure there's nothing untoward legally about such a practice, as a consumer, its a glaring red flag that this is likely a company built on nickel and dimeing it's unsuspecting customers. In the same vein, the automated phone system and customer service line is clearly structured to break the will of anyone in need of assistance. 
It's at least a 10 minute ordeal to sit through all of the recordings and selections before you can even start waiting in line for the representative. As I'm sure is easily inferred, that wait can be absolutely oppressive in length, and unsatisfactory when connected. On top of that, any representative you reach is inevitably in a different department than what you need. You can almost count on being blind transferred to a new representative at least once. That representative will need to be brought up to speed from scratch, and often may simply transfer the call again. In any given transfer, I would guess that approximately 20-40 %  of the time, the call is simply dropped, leaving you to start from zero each and every time. If you are calling about a complicated issue that requires a supervisor, or multiple departments, it becomes a serious barrier to be constantly transferred, when the failure rate per transfer is high. The time really adds up when you must relay a long story to each of these people, and have your information thoroughly vetted each timed. I have requested callbacks in the event that I am dropped. These callbacks never happen, even if you are dealing directly with a supervisor. One representative even told me that outbound calls are literally not even possible by the customer service department. I have requested that reps stay on the line to ensure that if the next line does not answer I am not merely recirculated into the general on-hold pool to start anew. It is simply not an accident the number of calls that are dropped or misrelayed. It is designed to get me to just suck it up and pay the wrongly assessed fee rather than waste the hours. I was once even told by a representative, that it is impossible to waive fees through customer service, that the only way to dispute any charge over {$15.00} is through a written formal complaint. Ironically, that representative did drop the fee I was questioning, leading me to believe that the lie was yet another attempt to inconvenience me to the point it was not worth disputing, so that they could siphon another {$82.00} fee. 
In any case, from the very beginning of the forbearance, I attempted over and over again to reinstate automatic payments. Each month, I would check to see if the funds came out on time, and discover that the payment had not been deducted. I would then spend the hours navigating customer service to see what the problem was with automatic payment. No explanation would be given, so I would make the payment by phone, and again go through the automatic payment setup, which of course takes a while to do. I would than be assessed an {$82.00} late fee, which I would request to have waived, due to the fact that the payment is not made ENTIRELY out of their failure to deduct the funds properly. This cycle continued month after month. Eventually I was told that during forbearance, and even for months after cancelling it, that automated payments were impossible to set up. Obviously, this information was not provided to me by any of the representatives as I provided banking details over and over to reinstate the process. 
After several months of this I just lost total faith in the company and have actually sought to refinance my loan with an institution that I can actually trust. I was willing to do almost anything to get away from this company and viewed the time and money spent trying to resolve this as sunk costs. I felt wronged, but it didnt feel worth it to complain further if I could simply get away. That was until I saw yet another fee in my XXXX statement for {$82.00}. The total fees for the month are {$160.00} although it is unclear where the second charge comes from. I simply cant take it anymore. I obviously would like the fees removed yet again, but I would also like to know exactly what fees I have been given over the life of the loan are and how that may have negatively affected my credit standing. I am happy to take responsibility for errors or issues on my end, but I just cant pay any more for an issue on their end, particularly when it seems to be an integral part of how the company conducts itself. At this point I strongly suspect there may have been other hidden charges along the way. Honestly it is more a matter of principle than the actual money. I think it likely that this company does this to untold other customers and I hate to think that they cushion their profits by repeating the same practice and preying on others like me.

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