Consumer complaint received 2023-03-09
Product: Mortgage — Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Trouble during payment process — 
Company: BANK OF AMERICA, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION (TX)

On XXXX we went to the Bank of America website to pay a CREDIT CARD. I've included a screen shot of that page. 

Unknowingly they have a place to pay on a defunct MORTGAGE that has been closed for someplace around 14 years. ( WHY IS A PAID OFF MORTGAGE EVEN AN OPTION? ) The available balance on that account is {$2700.00} which is approximately what the available balance is on the credit card we were trying to pay so it makes sense that would be the proper credit card account. Why would a defunct mortgage account even have an available balance amount and if so it would be in the hundreds of thousands balance available, not {$2700.00} This caused us to pay {$120.00} on the wrong account. If you enter the dollar amount you want to pay in the blanks provided it doesn't say this account is a Mortgage at any time, but if you click on the word Bank of America on the left side there is a splash screen that shows mortgage off to the side. Unfortunately this splash screen shows for less than a second. BUT SINCE THAT ACCOUNT HAS BEEN PAID OFF FOR APPROXIMATELY 14 YEARS WHY IS IT STILL ON THE BILL PAYING PROGRAM? 

They took our payment and credited it to a nonexistent mortgage and then sent us an email telling us our credit card account was past due and charging us a {$35.00} late fee. We immediately paid the bill ( again + the next month 's payment ) and they told us we'd have to call the mortgage department to get our money back. 

The mortgage department won't talk to us because we can not furnish an old account number, but after a search they said our mortgage had been paid off so long they can't even find it in their system. 

It has taken us all of XXXX and all of XXXX to get to point of filing a complaint. 

We have made multiple 45minute to an hour long phone calls getting the same runaround and today we went into the Bank and had a bank officer XXXX XXXX at the XXXX XXXX, Texas branch attempt to walk us through the process and after another hour call he finally got the mortgage department to say they would refund our money, but by mail only as they couldn't find an account and their system was different from the banks so couldn't refund it through the bank. The lady checked their records and said that a letter had gone out in XXXX so we could expect our money within a week. 

When we got home we discovered that letter was received today, but it wasn't a check, it was a letter stating they were going to investigate it. 

Then to add insult to injury the bank refused to refund our late fee and change the credit records because it was our fault that we'd clicked on and paid an account that shouldn't have been on the bill pay system at all. 

So not only did they accept payment on a mortgage that doesn't exist and so far we've been unable to get them to refund our money, but they've also... 

Charged us a late charge when we were making a payment in good faith to a flawed BofA payment system which would make it their fault not ours Plus they are reporting us as a 30 day late to the credit bureaus on an otherwise spotless credit report. 

And they are obfuscating the process and making it unnecessarily hard for people to get BofA 's misteaks corrected. 

At XXXX point we just wanted to get our money back, have them refund the late fee and correct the credit bureau, but now we feel they should also pay for the time and effort we've had to put into this.