Consumer complaint received 2020-10-19
Company: DISCOVER BANK
State: NC
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Improper use of your report
Sub-issue: Reporting company used your report improperly

Complaint:
The current economic situation severely impacts my life as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Struggling to keep a roof over my children 's heads and food on the table, I contacted Discover Card and asked for COVID-19 assistance. To be absolutely clear, COVID-19 assistance is not a gift that a customer receives from a credit card company or bank, but merely a payment deferment for a month, sometimes two. I had contacted Discover Card multiple times before I was 30 days past due on my monthly payment and asked for assistance. However, Discover Card refused every single time to help me. In the end, Discover Card did not provide me with any COVID-19 assistance. I strongly believe that this is due to discrimination. Not only refused Discover Card to provide me with COVID-19 assistance but in an attempt to force my hand to pay them and squeeze money out of me, the reported late payment to my credit file with all the major credit bureaus. Discover Card claims that this is something they have to do but conveniently and completely fails to mention that they refused to provide any COVID-19 assistance. I work with other creditors as well, and many of them do provide some COVID-19 relief. This is an unprecedented situation, so I believe that Discover Card has singled me out to get more money out of me. Their discriminatory tactics are not lost on me. Discover Card pushed me into a corner, and instead of offering me COVID-19 assistance, like they offered so many other people, Discover Card forced me to agree to a repayment program. The agent that I spoke to told me that if I agreed to their repayment terms, my late payment would be removed from my credit file with the major credit bureaus and that no further late payments will be reported going forward. Here is a verbatim quote of what the agent said to me : " We can't reverse or stop reportings at this point moving forward unless you can make that full past due. '' In years of being a Discover Card customer, I have not asked them for anything, even once, and I wasn't late even one time. Now that I fell on hard times due to COVID-19, like millions of people have, I asked Discover Card to defer my monthly payment and offer the almost meaningless COVID-19 assistance, which basically means that interest still accrues. At the same time, you don't make a payment, and no late payment is reported to your credit file. That's all there is to it. Now that I have agreed to Discover Card 's terms to repay them after they refused to provide COVID-19 assistance due to discrimination and pushed me into a cover using my credit file against me, I respectfully ask and absolutely demand that the one late payment be removed from my credit file with all the major credit bureaus. I did my part as a customer and notified them in due time that I needed COVID-19 relief, and they refused to help me, and not only that, but they tried to get  even more money out of me. Please remove the late payment from my credit file, it is not something that I have done on purpose, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act does not have a provision for COVID-19 in there, so in this instance, credit reporting is left at every lender 's discretion. The FCRA was never written with global pandemics and their economic impact in mind, so please remove my late payment from my credit file to follow through with the agreement that I made with Discover Card. Thank you.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation