Consumer complaint received 2016-04-25
Product: Mortgage — Conventional fixed mortgage
Issue: Loan servicing, payments, escrow account — 
Company: Onity Group Inc. (CA)

I finally completed a mortgage modification with my quite predatorial mortgage servicer OCWEN last year. It took close to 1.5 years to complete and 4 tries because they insisted there was always something slightly wrong with my documentation. In fact, the only thing that made it actually be accepted was the last complaint I filed against them with CFPB, after which it was accepted quite rapidly. Once accepted, I made all the trial payments as specified by them and the modification was granted. I then continued to make my new modified mortgage payments on time, very rarely a a day or two late, if at all. However, while OCWEN would receive my mortgage payments in a timely fashion, they would not accept the payments immediately upon receipt. Rather they would hold them for at least a month and at times it appeared indefinitely, unless I interceded. What emerged so that this situation would be avoided, was a need for me as the consumer to call them every single month to get the monies I 'd already paid them, accepted by them as the mortgage payment for that month. Every single time this was burdensome to me, with their agents repeatedly telling me I was wrong, mistaken, they did n't know anything about it etc. Typically these calls would take an hour or more until they read the notes on the account in sufficient depth that they slowly acknowledged I was right and they would almost begrudgingly accept the mortgage payment -- a month or more late in terms of their records. The most standard explanation, though I heard various versions, was that the payments were accidentally still being held by the old mortgage account, basically getting stuck there due to OCWEN 's technical errors, and then needed to be manually credited to the modified mortgage account, causing the delay and my need to forcibly insure it happened at all. Of course, all the while my credit score has been artificially lowered due to their erroneous reporting, and I believe they could try to make the claim that I have not actually been paying on time, in a way, keeping 'two sets of books '. Repeatedly, on these calls I had with them every month for 8+ months, I would then -- after the painful 45 minutes of trying yet again to prove I was right and knew what I was talking about -- attempt to get them to take the next step, i.e. to prevent it from happening again the next month. This part of the process with them would happen in a variety of ways, but invariably in the end I would receive all sorts of assurances from OCWEN representatives at various levels that it would in fact be fixed, only to have it repeat again the next month. Finally, I resolved to stay on the call as long as it took to be certain that the situation would get fully researched by their research department, taking a day off work to do so, as I had carefully looked back over every payment I was asked to make and everything seemed to check out that I did not owe them any money I had not already paid them, and was indeed current on my mortgage. This call took 3+ hours, but I thought I was finally out of the woods and they would confirm that the accounting was indeed their error, as every person I spoke to along the way was eventually convinced was true after reading through the case notes. However, this turned out not to be the case at all -- when their internal verdict came back, it was in fact that I was indeed behind a month on my payments and on top of that I owed them an additional sum of around {$900.00}. The explanations provided were too convoluted for me to follow. Of course, all along the way they have been sending me pending foreclosure type notices because of my theoretically not being current, something they have only accelerated since this " resolution '', escalating the language around " mortgage default '' etc.