Consumer complaint received 2023-07-10
Company: M&T BANK CORPORATION
State: KY
Product: Mortgage
Sub-product: FHA mortgage
Issue: Trouble during payment process

Complaint:
Around XXXX of XXXX, M & T Bank failed to pay my homeowners insurance that has been escrowed since XXXX. This is not the first year this has happened. Subsequently, I was the last person to find out when I received a notice that my mortgage payment was going up hundreds of dollars due to an escrow shortage. If you login to the mortgage payment portal, finding exact details of your escrow account is very difficult in that it does not show a running balance with credits and debits. I contacted customer service for days and spent hours arguing with supposed customer service employees who insisted because I didn't provide homeowners insurance, lender imposed insurance was applied to the tune of three times the cost of my actual homeowners insurance, which had never lapsed and had been paid! After wasting hours of my life debating what should have been the obvious, with an accessible person at M & T bank becoming available with the authority to correct the errors and update my escrow balance accordingly, I was told my credit would be affected if I chose not to pay the highly increased mortgage payment while they went thru the process up updating my information and verifying that in fact they owed this refund and figured out all of their mistakes. This has continued going on for months now with one excuse after another and AT MY EXPENSE AND I AM TIRED OF BEING PUSHED ASIDE AND MY FINANCIAL BURDENS OR THOSE OF ANYONE BEING FORCED TO PAY MORE OR INCUR MARKS AGAINST MY PERFECT CREDIT, IS SURELY CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR? WHY SHOULD I CONTINUE TO PAY FOR THEIR ERRORS, THEIR LACK OF COMMUNICATION WITHIN THEIR OWN ESTABLISHMENT AND THEIR LACK OF CONCERN FOR THE BURDENS THEY ARE CAUSING MY FAMILY AND I? Why do I have to continue calling them and being transferred to endless departments and half of the time non English speaking individuals who do not grasp the severity of this problem and how federal regulations protect all of us as basic standards of lending practices to not allow these types of scenarios to happen and then also continue to be the burden of the customer who has done nothing wrong?! They have still not updated my escrow account balance! They will do the same thing again and again increase my payment of not fault of my own even after I have went so far as to host conference calls between my insurance agent and their insurance department and it is all part of record, yet the numbers are never corrected and my question remains, what if they do this to 100 people? to 1000 people? where is our money and who is benefitting from having it in the wrong accounts for months on end accidentally???? XXXX! I want this entire bank investigated. It appears that they assume a small town Kentucky woman would not stand up to them or question these practices, but they were sadly mistaken! Please address this asap! I can not continue to pay inflated mortgage payments based on a false escrow shortage and the refunds that WERE issued only because of all of my work are still not reflected in my escrow balance as of today and the refunds happened finally in XXXX, XXXX!

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