Consumer complaint received 2022-09-04
Company: SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL
State: CO
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem with a purchase shown on your statement
Sub-issue: Credit card company isn't resolving a dispute about a purchase on your statement

Complaint:
Care Credit/Synchrony Bank card is a card that allows you to pay interest free for a specific amount of time depending on the amount of the transaction. 

These are called promotional balances. When you make a payment, Synchrony applies your payment in an algorithm to Promotional purchases and then to either expired promotional balances incurring interest or balances too small to fall under the interest free guideline. 

Synchrony does not provide on their statements how your payments are distributed to the aforementioned items. This was confirmed by a customer service representative while attempting to resolve this issue. 

The issue began on XX/XX/XXXX when we made our first call to Synchrony to request to pay off all interest bearing items and non-promotional purchase items. We were told this amount was {$2300.00} ( the total balance of our card at this time was {$3700.00} ). 

We paid the amount of {$2300.00} which we were told paid off ALL Interest bearing charges leaving only " promotional items '' that were not incurring interest. 

Upon receiving our following statement in XXXX, we noticed interest was still being charged on purchases when only non-interest items should have been on the statement. We called to question this and were told on XXXX that the original representative we spoke to on XX/XX/XXXX had " applied our payment incorrectly '' and that they could see that in the history. We were told that they would research and reallocate the funds properly. 

The following month we noticed 2 things : - The statement showed on XXXX a tremendous amount of charges, credits, or payments that made no sense. There was no detail or explanation as to what they were doing. 
- It still showed interest bearing items being billed which means that they had still not corrected the error. 

We have attempted to reconcile this monthly from XX/XX/XXXX to the current date of XX/XX/XXXX. 

We have never seen, despite requesting in almost every phone call, a detailed description or synopsis of how our original payment and any subsequent payments after that have been applied. 

As a result of not knowing what our true balance is due to incorrectly applied payments, we are questioning our balance for every billing cycle after XX/XX/XXXX. 

We request a detailed summary from Synchrony of all applications of payments, fees, charges, interest accrued, and any other attempts by Synchrony to make alterations to our account dating back to XX/XX/XXXX. 

We are prepared to pay almost our entire balance at this time, however, since we do not have any confidence that Synchrony is accurately reflecting our balance. 

We are sending a certified mail a formal dispute to Synchrony as well on XX/XX/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