I co-signed on my nieces student loans several years ago. She wasn'table to make the payments, so I was making them for her. What anightmare. Like you, the loans were made in several disbursements butis all under one loan number.
At first, I noticed that the payments weren't going where they weresupposed to and I was being charged late fee after late fee. Then Iwould get calls demanding payment after I had already made the payment. Sometimes I would get four or five calls a day, each demanding payment, each threatening to report me to the credit reporting agencies. Andeach call came from a different employee who spoke very limited english.
I asked to speak to supervisors repeatedly. I can't count how many times they would hang up on me instead.
I finally got to speak to a supervisor. I asked him why my paymentswere being applied incorrectly. He told me that their system appliedthe payments and they didn't have any control over it. I asked him ifthere was ANY way to designate where I wanted each payment to gobecause I couldn't do it by phone and I couldn't do it on the web site. He told me the only way to do that was by using their web site. I toldhim that I did not have the ability to make a payment using their website and asked how I could set that up because I had never seen thatoption on the web page. He put me on hold. When he came back, he toldme that a co-signer can't make payments from the web site and can'tdesignate where the payments are applied. I then asked him for astatement of the payment history on the loans. He said he would.instead of a statement of the loan history, I received a copys of thepage of the loan agreements that I had signed agreeing to co-sign theloans.interesting that it does not list that payment disbursementswould be at the discretion of AES, not the person making the payment. Had I known, I would NEVER have agreed to co-sign on these loans!
The next month, same story, same nightmare. And again, the next month. Each month, it was the same thing. I called and asked to speak to asupervisor again. Once again, I got lucky and was actually able tospeak to someone claiming to be a supervisor. This supervisor told methat they had sent the statement out to me. When I told him I hadn'treceived a loan history statement, but a copy of the signed co-signeragreement, he put me on hold. When he came back, I was told that thecompany could not send the loan history statements to a co-signer.
After years of battling with them over incorrect payment disbursements, late fees, untold reports to the reporting agencies due to THEIRmistakes, I finally recieved a copy of the loan history. And no, itwasn't current. The history showed that I had paid over $5,000 inpayments and late fees over those years. It showed that a grand total$106 had been paid to principal. Yes, I share fault on some of the latefees. There were times I simply could not make the full payments. Itake full responsibility for those late or partial payments.
I continued to fight with them over payments. Then my health failed andI was faced with medical bills. I was told that I had no optionsavailable to me because I was a co-signer. I made multiple calls.ineeded the harassing phone calls and threats to stop. It was too muchfor me to deal with because of my health problems. I was finally ableto get them to send me a form so I could file for a hardship and getthe payments reduced. I had to list every bill I had to the penny. Itfelt so invasive that I felt like my dignity had been completelystripped away from me. All to try and keep them from destroying ortaking away what little I had. They finally reduced the payments and Inoticed that the number of improper disbursements had also decreased. Perhaps because it was being managed by a different department within the company?
My niece was finally able to begin making the payments herself a coupleof months ago. This is the second month she has made them. I checkedthe web site to make sure the payments had posted, and had postedcorrectly. The nightmare is back. One loan is showing the payment shortby $1.87, another is showing the payment short by. 09 cents (total of$2.77). The last loan shows an overpayment of. You guess it, $2.77
Is there anything anyone can do to make this company accountable forTHEIR mistakes? The hell they have put me through because of theirerrors and poor business practices, should not have to be endured byanyone else. Unfortunately for me, I had no reason to look up anypossible negative feed back on this company until after I had alreadybeen sentenced to do business with them by my own signature.
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