Consumer complaint received 2024-02-16
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Trouble with how payments are being handled
Company: MOHELA (CA)

MOHELA is a corrupt loan servicer that is using " mistakes '' in its payment processing system to scam people out of additional payments that they do not owe. Contacting MOHELA to rectify these issues takes hours out of one 's work day, which is not feasible for many working people. I hope that this complaint will help get justice for those who are unable to address this issue themselves. 

My student loans were transferred from another servicer to MOHELA during the pandemic loan forbearance period. The first time I ever had to make a payment to MOHELA was in XX/XX/XXXX. 

Leading up to XX/XX/XXXX, I received multiple email notifications telling me to create an account on their platform and set up auto-debit so they could withdraw payments directly from my bank. I did so prior to the deadline. However, when the time of the first payment came around, I suddenly received an urgent email that " due to an error '' in the way the auto-debit was set up, auto-debit would not start working until XXXX and I needed to log in and set up another payment for the first month. My payment was already in default by the time I got the email ( through no fault of my own! ) and I was able to pay within a few days of the original due date ( on XX/XX/XXXX ). 

The auto-debit appeared to work correctly after that, and I made my next payments without an issue on XX/XX/XXXX, and XX/XX/XXXX. 

In late XX/XX/XXXX ( over the holidays ) I received a notice that MOHELA was transferring its services to a new web platform and that I would need to set up yet another new account before my XXXX payment. I was sick and tired of dealing with them, so I decided to pay off my loan in its entirety. On XX/XX/XXXX, I logged in, requested a loan payoff estimate, and scheduled a final payment. 

The very next day, I received a notice from MOHELA that they had mistakenly billed me for my loan in Fall XXXX when I was actually still in forbearance. The notice said that if I had paid them, I should request a refund. I called an waited on hold for nearly an hour, and finally spoke with a customer service rep who promised to refund my XXXX and XXXX payments, and to cancel the XXXX payment which was still being processed. I told him that I had just scheduled a payoff of my loan and asked if the fall payments would have affected the payoff estimate that I'd received the day before. He told me no - all was well with my loan payoff. 

Both the refund and the loan payoff showed up in my bank statement in XXXX, so I assumed I was finally done with the nightmare of MOHELA. But yesterday ( XX/XX/XXXX ), I received a notice that my loan payment had been processed. What loan payment?! I logged in today and saw that my old monthly payment amount had been auto-debited from my bank. My MOHELA account page shows an amount due that is equal to my monthly payment, which does not make any sense. I called XXXX TIMES to try and get this resolved and after waiting on hold for XXXX mins each time, was forced to hang up to get back to work. 

XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX. Most people do not have this luxury. I believe MOHELA is taking advance of the average person 's inability to correct their " errors '' in order to take extra payments that they are not owed. Whether or not they are intentionally scamming people, their incompetent accounting methods and inaccessible customer service make them unqualified to service federal student loans.