Consumer complaint received 2018-09-19
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with your lender or servicer — Trouble with how payments are being handled
Company: HEARTLAND PAYMENT SYSTEMS INC (CA)

My Perkins loan was taken over by Heartland ECSI in the beginning of this year. Before that it was serviced by XXXX XXXX and I had no problems with it, paying quarterly as per terms. 

As soon as Heartland took it over, I was sent an email in XXXX saying the loan was past due, which was the first time I had ever heard from them, and was not true. I was sent a follow up email a few days later saying the previous email was sent in error. After I set up my account and checked, I made my quarterly payment on XX/XX/2018 due in XXXX or so to get ahead of it. 

From then on I received no correspondence or letters, even though my address, phone number, and email were all current. What I did get was an alert that a negative item was added to my credit reports on XX/XX/2018 saying the account was 60 days past due ( which doesn't make sense since I made a payment in XXXX ). At this time I checked my account and saw that it had no past due notice ( please see the attached pdf, page1 ). When I clicked into the account details, it also said nothing about being overdue and next payment was due XX/XX/2018. ( page 2 ).

Checking the other details, I saw no records of any previous billing statements. All the payment was either not correct ( some screens said the payoff amount was {$1800.00} and others said {$1900.00} ). One page had XXXX for principal owed and paid even. Nothing was correct here ( pages 3 & 4 ) I tried to contact customer service but was not helped very well at all and instead was deferred to a different department and told they can only be contacted by phone, of course the hours were not convenient to  my work schedule or hard to get a hold of. I tried contacted customer service again and again deferred to a phone number to call. You can see some of the chat log from the first conversation I had. 

During that time I tried to make payments to update the account but had any number of problems doing so ( it wouldn't take my bank account info or reset the information ). I had made a payment before, I couldn't understand why it was so difficult at this point. I finally got a payment to go through on XX/XX/XXXX, for {$280.00} AND set up automatic, recurring payments so this would not happen again ( see page 8 ). I received an email a few days later saying the payment was rejected, then yet another one saying the payment was reversed because " Unable to Locate Account. '' ( page 9 ) At this point I checked the account and all I could see was the this strange account info ( page 5 ). I could not make any payments and all the info was completely off now, saying the principal owed was {$100.00}. It showed that I made a payment XX/XX/XXXX as well. Again, other info was all XXXX or very wrong. ( page 6 & 7 ) At this point I wanted to pay off the loan in full but I could not contact them. I tried finding email addresses to contact but only found one, and was given a reply that Heartland does not do any business regarding Perkins loans over email. 

After this exchange I checked the National Student Loan Database and discovered that the loan had already been to the XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX on XX/XX/2018. I was never informed this would happen in any way, again all my information was current and correct. Now that account is reflected on my credit report as well.