Consumer complaint received 2022-05-19
Product: Credit card or prepaid card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Other features, terms, or problems — Problem with customer service
Company: AMERICAN EXPRESS COMPANY (ME)

When I moved from XXXX to XXXX, I must have missed changing my address on my American Express account. This never caused an issue until my grandmother, who had lived with us, lost her home and moved in with my uncle. Somehow, AE found HER address, which was and is in no way connected to me -- I don't even know that address by heart and have it nowhere connected to me -- and started sending her collections notices. This is an issue for two reasons, one being that they had to have gone out of their way to get her new address, because there is absolutely nothing connecting me to it, and two is that I had no way to know they had closed my account and sent it to a collections agency. I am a student working part-time and had enrolled in their financial hardship program to lower my monthly payments. I had my account on auto-pay, and the payments have been coming out of my account, monthly, for the past few years. However, for some reason, they seem to have decided that this was not enough and I was no longer afforded financial support and sent me to collections without me knowing that anything was wrong because on my end I had been making my monthly payments. When attempting to resolve this, I encountered a significant amount of issues. First of all, when trying to sign in to my account I was told that my login was incorrect. Simply trying to resolve that took literal days of fighting with the website as it would crash every time I tried to change my password. When I was finally able to get in to my account, I found the collections notice and attempted to contact the number necessary to resolve the issue. However, every time I called, I was met with a message stating that the call could not be completed. This happened every time. I spent hours trying to get through to an agent using the regular customer service line, which fought me every step of the way because it kept trying to just send me back to the broken line. In the end someone finally took me and was able to patch me through to the collections, where I explained the situation and had them change the address to my current one, and explained my financial situation and that I had been paying my bill. She told me that it had been fixed and that she put a note in my account that I was working toward paying with the lower balance due to my financial situation. I believed her and thought it was fixed. However, today I got another text from my grandmother with yet another letter sent to her house from American Express, a day after I had paid off a signifigant amount of the total ( XXXX ). She is in a panic, worried that they are going to come after her and that she will be XXXX again. I tried once more to get in touch with AE to resolve this issue and express my displeare at their dishonesty, yet came upon the same issue. I can not log in, I can not change my password, I can not connect through the phone, and after some digging I found a customer service email that I attempted to contact, only to find that it is " permanently diabled ''. The amount of stress they have put us both through is enormous and unfair, and it is clear at this point that they are purposefully making it as difficult as possible to contact them, so that this issue can not be properly resolved. They lied when they claimed to have resolved it the first time, went behind my back to harrass my grandmother, went out of their way to get her address when it is in no way connected to me, went behind my back to send my account to collections despite my financial assistance enrollment, and their technical difficulties are bordering on purposeful abd malicious. I am to the point of wishing I could afford a lawyer so I could sue them for the emotional toll this has taken on both myself and my poor grandmother. Please, please help me, because they have proven that there is no hope of getting this resolved through their company.