Consumer complaint received 2018-09-19 00:00:00
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
State: CA

Complaint narrative:
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.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation