Consumer complaint received 2017-10-19
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Trouble with how payments are being handled
Company: AES/PHEAA (MN)

On XXXX spoke with a representative and received instruction for how to modify my automatic payment. I followed their directions and accessed my account via the XXXX website to increase my automatic payment. At that time, the website said my automatic scheduled payment for XXXX/XXXX/XXXX totaled {$340.00} ( consisting of which {$100.00} was my " Monthly Payment '' and {$230.00} was the " Requested Additional Amount '' [ See Screenshot as of XXXX/XXXX/XXXX for illustration.I followed the process to increase my payment to a total of {$630.00} by increasing the " Requested Additional Amount '' to {$530.00}. After following the process, I received a confirmation screen with confirmation number XXXX and a message that " These changes will be applied to your XXXX XXXX payment scheduled to withdraw on XXXX/XXXX/XXXX ''. When I refreshed the automatic payments page the new payment amount was not reflected. So I repeated the process and received another confirmation number XXXX with the same confirmation message. However, when i refreshed the automatic payment page it still said my upcoming payment would be {$340.00}. [ Please see screenshots of the confirmation numbers and messages ]. On XXXX XXXX or XXXX XXXX i checked the automatic payment page again to see if it took few days/weeks to reflect my new payment. Still the page said my scheduled payment for XXXX/XXXX/XXXX was {$340.00}. Since my intent was to pay a total of {$630.00} per month, I scheduled a manual payment of {$290.00} to be made on XXXX/XXXX/XXXX. To my surprise, when I checked my account on XXXX/XXXX/XXXX in addition to the {$290.00} payment on XXXX, there was also a payment made in the amount of {$580.00}. I spent an XXXX hour XXXX minutes and XXXX seconds discussing this issue and waiting for the representative to discuss with her supervisor. During this time I was asked to upload screenshots i had of the confirmation screens only to experience a glitch in the system in that the system would not upload the proper document. I selected the document to upload via the " Other '' document type and the system would only upload the previous document which I had uploaded weeks prior ( even though i did not even select that document to be uploaded ). Eventually i selected a different document type and was able to successfully upload the screenshots for the representative to see for them self. I was then placed on another hold for the representative to speak with their supervisor and they came back and told me the following : XXXX. ) The amount of {$340.00} which was displayed to me in the automatic payments page was wrong. 
XXXX. ) The XXXX confirmation numbers and the messages i received informing that my payment of {$630.00} would be applied on XXXX/XXXX/XXXX were wrong. 
XXXX. ) There are some " XXXX '' being worked on XXXX. ) The representative was not aware these issues existed XXXX. ) Confirmed that there has been no notification sent out to people who have loans XXXX. ) Told me that if I want to know what my next payment will be, I need to look at my direct debit billing statement XXXX. ) The payment of {$580.00} was because my monthly payment was {$100.00} and my direct debit agreement from XXXX/XXXX/XXXX stated that my additional withdraw amount was {$470.00}. 

However, my direct debit agreement from XXXX/XXXX/XXXX was no longer valid as I had already paid XXXX of the XXXX loans off and I had provided additional payment processing instructions in writing on XXXX/XXXX/XXXX for how to properly allocate my payments. Not only did Fedloan servicing fail to execute on my request to allocate my payment properly, I had call them to have them correctly allocate funds.The payment to pay off a portion of my loan per the payment instructions provided was made on XXXX/XXXX/XXXX and appropriately applied on XXXX/XXXX/XXXX. On XXXX/XXXX/XXXX, my automatic payment was {$630.00} as expected. It was not until XXXX that I noticed my automatic payment was surprisingly changed. Based on my payment instructions, I expected my payment to remain at {$630.00} however, it was modified and apparently the source of truth as to what my payment would be was rather obscure considering the website was telling me XXXX different things. 

The fact that Fedloan servicing has several known defects on their website which are give false and misleading information to consumers is unacceptable and should be re mitigated immediately. Any webpage, process, screen, communication, etc displaying knowingly misleading and incorrect information should have been taken down so consumers are not taking action and making decisions on false information. As a result of this false information, instead if having {$630.00} come out of my bank account {$870.00} came out. I am fortunate that I did not encounter an overdraft ; however, I suspect there are many other consumers who have encountered this issue and have incurred overdraft fees. Furthermore, had I not done my due diligence and checked to see if my request was processed, I would have expected it to be processed ( considering I had confirmations indicating it would be ) and for all we know, it XXXXy have never been processed and this could have resulted in a significant amount of interest incurring to the benefit of Fedloan servicing and to the detriment of the consumer.