Consumer complaint received 2017-05-26
Company: Navient Solutions, LLC.
State: CA
Product: Student loan
Sub-product: Private student loan
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer
Sub-issue: Trouble with how payments are being handled

Complaint:
I went to a school called the    XXXX   XXXX   XXXX   XXXX   XXXX   . Little did we know at the time ( I say we because my dad co-signed the loan ) that the certifications that the school were handing out were not relevant to the industry. The school was intended to provide   licenses    for   XXXX   XXXX   XXXX  . As it turns out,   license for   XXXX   XXXX   XXXX  is not needed and there was no advantage to gaining a   license for   XXXX   XXXX   XXXX  , we were unaware of this at the time. I understand personal responsibility and have paid a school loan for a number of years simply because my dads name was attached to the loan. I realized a few years later that the payments I was making were hardly touching the balance and I could never get any reliable information from the loan provider,  XXXX   XXXX  at the time, to show why my balance appeared to be increasing. I spent some time in the military and my loan was on deferment. After the service I am pursuing my degree and now Navient is telling me that I am not eligible to defer the loan even though I am  a full time student.  Apparently being a private loan does not permit deferment. The company calls me incessantly and is using bully tactics and fear of credit damage to try and force me to pay. My argument is the school should have never been backed by the government to provide loans in the first place. It is obvious there was no real oversight on the part of the Department of Education. The school licensures were phony and the school no longer exists. The actions of    XXXX   XXXX   XXXX   XXXX   XXXX    amount to federally backed robbery. Navient of course will only set tle for 90 %  of the total sum and refuses to negotiate past that point. I would be willing to satisfy some portion of the loan to make this end but I can not handl e 90  % of  XXXX  dollars. Which is almost the original loan amount. My issue is twofold, one being that the payments I was making in the early years of the loan, which would have been {$190.00} per month from around   XX/XX/XXXX  to  XX/XX/XXXX  @   what was supposed to be  a 6  % interest rate, were improperly applied to the loan. I realize the school is being sued for grotesquely poor handing of payees payments. The second issue is the schools unwillingness to defer the loans while I am  in school  and their ridiculous level of harassment concerning repayment. It seems to me they know that they are going to end up losing in court and are doing whatever they can to retrieve as much money from loan participants before that happens. The federal government was conned by the middle-man ( the school ) and the consumer is left holding the bag for the equivalent of an additional car payment every month. I paid faithfully on this loan for  4 or 5 years and owe almo st exactly what the loan was originally worth. I would at the very least like to defer my loans w hile in school,  at the most I would like loan forgiveness for something that has benefited me absolutely nothing. The school should have never had the authority to write or process loans in the first place, especially for a service that requires no training.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation