Consumer complaint received 2016-09-01
Product: Student loan — Federal student loan servicing
Issue: Dealing with my lender or servicer — Trouble with how payments are handled
Company: AES/PHEAA (VA)

My stafford loans are handled by AES/PHEAA. When I was dealing with PHEAA, things went pretty well. Around the end of 2014, I got stuck dealing with AES for the first time, and things immediately took a considerable turn for the worse. After that, every time I tried to make a payment, it was some new, impassable issue. Things like account pages refusing to load or my account being locked after a single typo, both of which required calling into their call centers, since they apparently have n't been able to figure out online account management yet. Things are n't any better with their call centers. Assuming you can even get someone on the phone, which is a crapshoot at best, nobody ever seems to be able to find your account, and you get a completely different response from each person you talk to. Right off the bat, this nonsense put me several months behind getting my payments made, but this was nothing compared to their next stunt. After another few months, they suddenly refused to process any of my payments, claiming my checking account was " invalid '' ( they did n't give any details beyond that ). This was news to me, as I write checks on a pretty regular basis and none of them ever bounce. I tried calling and had no luck, as usual. I tried waiting it out and seeing if the issue was intermittent. No luck there either. After a five or six months I started getting letters threatening to EVENTUALLY report me to a collections agency, report me to the credit reporting bureaus, and get the loan guarantor to place my loan in default. All of these turned out to be lies. They had apparently been reporting me to the credit agencies the whole time, they never made any attempt to collect ( they were the ones preventing me from paying in the first place ), and the guarantor eventually contacted me on their own. I eventually responded to the guarantor, hoping I could pay them directly and cut AES out of the equation, but they said it had to be done by AES. I made several more calls to AES, eventually reaching someone who could actually find my account, and informed them I had spoken with the guarantor. They told me I had to talk to another department within AES in order to prevent my account from defaulting and gave me a phone number, rather than transferring me ... ... it was the phone number of the guarantor. Finally, I got the guarantor to call AES themselves, with me on the line, at which point AES finally allowed me to make a payment ... ..but only over the phone. After that, they sent me an email claiming my routing number was wrong, yet they were still, somehow, able to process the payment. I responded back pointing out that nobody besides them had had issues with that routing number for over fifteen years, and now, as if by magic, my checking account works on their website again. This whole debacle lasted almost an entire year. A couple months ago, I started having issues with their site again, and after finally managing to get a payment made this week, I decided to check and see if their absurdity had dinged my credit at all. That 's when I found out that they had lied about " possibly '' reporting against my credit. They had been doing it, three times over, since day one and have completely ruined my credit. The only reason I did n't pay these loans off years ago was because I wanted to build up credit in the first place. Now, because of these XXXX, I have gone from having great credit, with no complaints against me from anyone but AES, to having a credit score so low I 'll be lucky if I can get a loan with a co-signer, all over loans that AES, themselves, repeatedly prevented me from paying.