Consumer complaint received 2023-07-08
Product: Credit card or prepaid card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Struggling to pay your bill — Credit card company won't work with you while you're going through financial hardship
Company: DISCOVER BANK (NJ)

I have an account with Discover- this complaint is primarily about their violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act but also misleading statements made during the pandemic under the guise of offering assistance. 

In the past XXXX calendar days Discover has contacted me over XXXX separate times regarding my defaulted account, on a week that included a federal holiday ( XX/XX/XXXX ) where they were presumably closed. Some days this exceeds XXXX or XXXX calls beginning at XXXX XXXX and ending around XXXX. I am aware that is within the allowable time window, just illustrating that it begins as soon as they can and goes repeatedly all day and night. The quantity of calls is XXXX the allowable amount. 

I can not remove my phone number from my account because when it was an active account I opted into text alerts, I can not opt out of those alerts though their website anymore because the account is closed. That seems a blatant attempt to try to circumvent laws by locking people into a supposed " opted in '' status without the ability to opt out. 

During the pandemic I entered a payment plan with them, the supposed agreement was XXXX of fixed automatic payments of a lower amount than my minimum payment had been and a slightly reduced interest rate. The deal was promoted to me as " the account would be suspended during the payment program and if I made all the payments on time then at the conclusion of the program the account would remain open ''. I submitted the XXXX payment on time in XXXX of XXXX. While they acknowledged I had completed the plan, and that my account showed an available credit of over {$3000.00} they never turned my card back on citing that it was pending a review. The minimum payments however still doubled to over {$700.00} a month which was more than they were before the payment plan despite my balance being reduced by thousands. In XXXX I lost my job and Discover was unwilling to make any additional deals or payment plans. By XXXX I could no longer afford the payments against a card with no credit line and it seemed clear that they had no plans to reactivate the account so I prioritized other debts and defaulted. That program seemed like a blatant attempt to collect {$7200.00} in payments from me against an account they had no plans to keep open so they could continue to charge higher interest for that year, so the {$7200.00} in payments only reduced the balance by {$3000.00}, as opposed to the closed account payment options with interest rates as low as 0 %. They are no longer willing to offer low interest settlement, the best they will do is knocking a few XXXX off and wanting payment in full within 3 months. I spent a total of 11 months unemployed in multiple stints since XX/XX/XXXX, and paid them on time for all XXXX of the " assistance '' payments during this time. They " continued '' the relationship by not upholding their end of the deal and now aggressively harassing me in violation of the law.