NEGATIVE CREDIT REPORTING
Complaint
Karla Orlando
Country: United States
I received a past due statement over three weeks late which caused my credit to be over 30 days delinquent therefore negatively impacting both mine and my husbands credit. We both had 750 plus credit scores and are currently below 700 due to this debacle. I have been calling and speaking to representative after representative only to be told that there is nothing that can be done. The statement date and the postage date are three weeks apart which only shows that I would never have been able to make the payment on time. I could not pay online at the time and was told that it was a post office error. This is unacceptable and I am hoping that you can intervene. I am never late on payments and my credit rating has suffered which has caused an increase on my insurance payments and other rates.
Comments
The postage date is the Post Office's proof of when it entered their system. This is so whether they cancel a physical stamp, or the sender used a postage machine to apply postage. In the latter case, users of postage machines are required by postal regulations to use the proper date.
This postage date is also consistent with when you received the statement, late.
The evidence therefore shows that BofA violated FCBA by sending the statement too close to the due date.
This is an internal BofA audit flag, as it indicates that their billing operation probably has a systematic failure, since it's not really capable of just making this kind of mistake with a single customer. That makes it of potential interest to outside regulators, so it's in BofA's interest to fix it themselves.
BofA is capable of waiving the interest and late fees due to their own error and violation, and through such admission, correcting their negative credit reporting that resulted from their own error.
The late mailing is a violation of FCBA without regard to whether "you could have paid it since you should have known to check". Furthermore, deliberate systemic "late mailing" is a fraudulent practice that inflates "late fees" and "interest", that might suggest that regulators check for other known illegal predatory practices (opening unauthorized accounts, cramming "insurance", destroying payments to inflate "late fees", and other similar games).