Consumer complaint received 2020-11-28
Product: Debt collection — Auto debt
Issue: Written notification about debt — Didn't receive enough information to verify debt
Company: CITIZENS FINANCIAL GROUP, INC. (NY)

I feel Citizens One Auto Finance of Citizens Bank wrongfully repossessed my vehicle. The morning of Saturday XX/XX/XXXX, my wife and i returned to the house after running a few errands and saw our truck missing. I went to the neighbors who had a camera over there driveway and saw that the truck was towed. We just paid our car payment the day prior which is well before it is due. We called our bank to verify this payment was sent, as well as the prior few months. All seemed good. We called the financial institution our car loan was through and they didnt give us much info before they forwarded our call to their collections department, which was closed for the weekend. We called the collections department Monday XX/XX/XXXX. They informed us that we missed half a months payment ( {$530.00} of {$930.00} XXXX in XXXX XXXX. After looking into this, we did in fact split our payments that month and accidentally sent the second half of our truck payment to our car loan. We received no notice of this discrepancy. Since we were then delinquent in our payments at that point, the company chose to revoke the two approved deferments we received in XXXX and XX/XX/XXXX ( my family XXXX  at that time ). When Citizens Bank revoked these deferments, they shifted our payment history left, and they made it look as though we had been 60 days delinquent since XX/XX/XXXX, and then 90 days delinquent since XX/XX/XXXX. Again, we received no notice of any of this. When we asked the company why we werent notified, they said they sent notification to addresses that we hadnt lived at since XXXX or earlier, and these addresses were never associated with the loan. The also said they were calling a phone number we havent been associated with since XXXX as well. At this point they informed us that our vehicle had been repossessed and it would cost {$4900.00} to make out account current and get our vehicle back. We had 23 days to do this. Long story short, we had to sell our serial numbered collectors XXXX for half its worth, and we also received an XXXX loan in order to get my truck back. We did get it back though and the loan is current. 

I will also add that neither my wife nor I have ever defaulted on any loan. Both of these vehicles were within a year of being paid off and the one that was repossessed was at 0 % interest. From my understanding, the bank did not have to do this. They could have taken our credit history into account and properly contacted us in order to settle the discrepancy. I feel the bank decided to repossess the vehicle in hopes that they could get double their money when they sent it to auction if we couldnt pay the required amount. They have also raised our interest rate because of this and we now owe almost {$10000.00} more which adds another year to the loan. If you also include the late fees they charged us, they will now make an extra {$11000.00}. The repossession also hit our credit after only a week when we had 21 days to get the vehicle back.