Consumer complaint received 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Product: Credit card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem with a company's investigation into an existing problem — Their investigation did not fix an error on your report
Company: DISCOVER BANK
State: NC

Complaint narrative:
This case is opened as " XXXX XXXX ''. I am still in Discovers system under my maiden name " XXXX XXXX ''. 

In XXXX of XXXX auto-pay was turned off on my Discover card account. I relied on this function to prevent late payments. I did not turn off this function. 

In XXXX of XXXX my husband was looking through our financial information and discovered my XXXX XXXX was XXXX points lower than it should be. Upon further investigation we discovered that I had several late payments on my Discover card. I was confused since I had auto-pay enabled. 

We contacted Discover via chat where a representative confirmed there were late payments and that auto-pay had been XXXX in XX/XX/XXXX. We were very confused and asked them to investigate how this happened. The rep said auto-pay had been " turned off by our system '' but also said they did not see any notifications sent out that would be consistent with their system disabling auto-pay. They said they actually were seeing that it was XXXX on " web/online ''. The discover rep said that they would be able to refund the late fees and have it removed from our account. They said to wait until this posted in XXXX hours then contact the credit bureaus to get the late payments removed from my credit. 

Upon further investigation on the CFPB website I found that it is actually the responsibility of Discover to contact the credit bureaus to fix this and not my responsibility as a consumer. 

I contacted Discover to have them work directly with the credit bureaus. I was transferred to supervisors who said that even though I did not cancel auto-pay, they could not find an error on their side and therefore were not able to contact the credit bureaus to get these late payments removed. They stated they could only do this if they found that they had made a mistake. 

I have several issues with this : 1. There is no 3rd party verification of their findings that there was no bug or IT error that could have caused an auto-pay disable. As I said, I did not disable auto-pay for exactly this reason.

2. Banks never admit culpability so if the only way they would report this to the credit bureau is if they were culpable... they never clean up anything they get wrong? 
XXXX. This is an incentive for banks to purposefully cancel auto-pay on their consumers to get late fees from them. Then if consumers catch them they just give the money back and deny culpability because there is no third party investigation. 

This is theft from the consumer ( in this case me ) and to their credit they returned the late fee money. However I still have negative marks on my credit report and Discover is claiming there is no way to help me get these removed. 

I am seeking CFPB assistance in getting Discover to work with the credit bureaus ( XXXX, XXXX, XXXX ) to remove the derogatory remarks from my credit report.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation