Consumer complaint received 2017-11-20
Company: Ocwen Financial Corporation
State: CA
Product: Mortgage
Sub-product: Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Struggling to pay mortgage

Complaint:
I am filing this CFPB complaint, my 3rd in the past 2 weeks, documenting an ongoing set of issues regarding my current offer of a Mortgage Modification from OCWEN. My contact within the Office of the Consumer Ombudsman has responded to my last complaints by providing a second extension to my deadline to execute the current Mortgage Modification offer, as long as two conditions are met : 1 ) that I return a signed copy of the document by XX/XX/XXXX, 2 ) that I make my payment in the approximate amount of {$2500.00} by when it 's due in XX/XX/XXXX as I always have in the past. 

On the first condition, OCWEN is currently preparing answers to my questions that I anticipate I will receive in sufficient time to make an informed decision before the deadline for my signature. I certainly hope so. 

On the second condition, however, fulfilling it has proven much more difficult. Up through my XX/XX/XXXX payment, all of my trial period payments have been made on an automated basis which I set up with my Bank. When I check on the XX/XX/XXXX however to make certain that the payment had gone out, I discovered that it had not. Upon contacting my Bank directly, I learned that were unable to tell me why the payment had not been delivered, and indeed, whether it might still go out without any warning before it did. 

Despite this professional shortcoming on my Bank 's part, however, I did the only responsible thing I could to ensure that the payment was made on time, which was to go to the bill pay section of OCWEN 's website and attempt to follow through on the instructions to make my {$2500.00} payment on time in XX/XX/XXXX on my own. This was despite the fact that by doing so I could have made a duplicate payment in the end, money which OCWEN would not have refunded me and which would have overdrawn my only checking account. 

When I did however, I encountered more evidence of OCWEN 's tendency to issue two or more sets of contradictory instructions to its customers, confusing them and putting them at risk. Logging into the OCWEN website, on the first page ( see screenshot ) it tells me that my " Next Payment Amount Due '' is {$0.00}, which any reasonable person would interpret as meaning that their account was current and no payment was due. Because it made no sense that it also said my next payment was due in XX/XX/XXXX, however, and more broadly their patterns of customer mistreatment, I knew to take nothing at face value, so I pressed on to " Make a Payment ''. 

After making the necessary selections to authorize a payment however, I was then blocked in carrying it out by OCWEN 's own system, the error message explaining : " Sorry. Right now we ca n't take a Standard Single E-Payment because the account is 10 or more business days overdue. But, you can choose the Rush Single E-Payment option from the Payments Page. You can also make a payment by phone. '' ( screenshot ) I then of course attempted to track down " Rush Single E-Payment '', looking through multiple screens, but finding it was nowhere to be found, no such option existed. Again, two sets of contradictory instructions, creating confusion. In looking for it however, I did discover another error message stating, " IMPORTANT Because your account is past due, we can only accept a payment ( s ) for the full reinstatement amount. Click here for a Reinstatement Quote ''. Once you go through this process you then learn that effectively OCWEN is claiming that I owe {$7100.00} and will need to pay this amount in order to make any payment at all. 

Except this is not a way forward even if I had all this extra cash laying around, given that 1 ) it is only IF all four of my payments in the amount of {$2500.00} ( XX/XX/XXXX, XX/XX/XXXX, XX/XX/XXXX, XX/XX/XXXX ) are ignored that I would actually owe this absurd and erroneous amount, 2 ) even if I did pay it, OCWEN would not count it against the {$2500.00} I actually owe for my XX/XX/XXXX payment, but rather against this other {$7100.00} amount as though my Mortgage Modification offer had never existed. 

Calling OCWEN, which I also did on XX/XX/XXXX, yielded the same result by phone, that there was no amount in payment they would accept that was less than {$7100.00}. At this point it occurred to me that it was likely not my Bank at all that had failed in the making of my payment, but rather that OCWEN had likely blocked the original automated payment as well, with the same excuse and twisted logic. I could only thus assume that the same would hold if I were to send OCWEN a check as well. At this point I had exhausted my options to actually make a payment, so I both called and emailed XXXX XXXX on XX/XX/XXXX as well, complaining to him directly that his own company was keeping me from fulfilling his instructions. While he had all day Friday XX/XX/XXXX to respond and nearly all of today Monday the XX/XX/XXXX as well, I have heard nothing from XXXX XXXX about this situation, nor has any resolution been provided by any other part of the Company as well.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation