Consumer complaint received 2024-01-18
Product: Mortgage — Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Trouble during payment process — Fees charged
Company: Onity Group Inc. (LA)

XX/XX/XXXX Dear Madam or Sir, I'm making this complaint because I feel that PHH Mortgage Services or other companies using that trademark and logo lured me into paying late and penalized my wife and me even though PHH was never damaged, because I never paid later than 30 days. This is true because for many decades that was the only situation in which they notified me of a problem and would not waive a late fee : in the very rare event over 30 years that I paid AFTER 30 days late. If I had known they were going to exact a late payment penalty against me for paying later within 30 days AFTER WE ACCEPTED IN WRITING THEIR OFFER TO HELP US, I could have taken other measures to avoid the {$1500.00} or so penalty they imposed for our being a bit late for the several months in which I requested help during the Covid downturn. Documentation of the PHH offer of assistance and my acceptance is included with this complaint, in PDFs entitled starting with " PHH XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX and continuing with dates going through the following months, about 12 months in all. During this Covid pandemic period, I filed this same request online on the PHH payment website EVERY MONTH that I paid later than the XXXX, and in every one of these months, I paid in full by the end of the month. 

In XX/XX/XXXX, at the end of the loan 's 30-year term, and until I gave in to their unfair demands, PHH failed to send my mortgage release and ignored or gave incoherent and unreasoned responses to my written requests for help, apparently to coerce me into paying by threatening to extend payments indefinitely. See attached, enclosed PHH 2nd Denial Attachment Letter where they deny having received anything from me, DESPITE MY FILLING OUT THEIR OWN FORM ON THE PAYMENT WEBSITE MONTHLY -- which submissions are proven by the attached requests for PHH assistance copied in It appears they also kept returnable excess escrows, probably a further reason for their delay, saying they had to re-calculate escrows for the year even though they must have known the loan would be terminated by the time any insurance or tax escrows would be paid out. I later fully paid our-of-pocket all XXXX  flood insurance and property taxes ( the only two year-end payments they had been escrowing for years before ), and these were the escrows they re-calculated in the month my loan was to terminate and was in fact paid off by us. 

I never had the sense they understood in the least the injustice of saying they wanted to help and using that as an enticement to position PHH to unfairly impose a penalty. This had to be the exact opposite of the intention of the law and of consumer financial protection in general. Or so it seems to me, as I believe it would to most borrowers. One must ask now : If this is how they HELP people, what horrific things are they doing when NOT offering to help? I wish they had not made the offer at all, and I would have saved the near- {$1500.00} they overcharged me. ( I haven't even been able to discern from their incoherent and incomplete documentation exactly how much they overcharged us, but it amounted to about the same as an extra monthly payment would have been, in the neighborhood of {$1500.00}. ) By the way, this also seems like a breach of contract, because they unilaterally modified the repayment agreement we had by claiming to offer forbearance upon request and imposing draconian fees without alerting us while the whole country was in the midst of the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid pandemic and economic downtown, a time when all my business seemed to go away as well. 

I have attached/included the PHH offers of assistance and our acceptance of them by monthly filling out the webpage containing the offers of assistance on which we relied. I have also included other year-end statements they sent as well as their perfunctory denial of my appeal for a waiver of all these unjust fees. I've tried to work with them, but they have been uncommunicative and resistant, handling me off to people who couldn't speak English well enough for my aged hearing to grasp and giving me nothing detailed or substantive in writing, probably thinking that would shield them from your scrutiny. 

Thank you in advance for your attention and your assistance!