With American Education Services (AES) I held a PLUS loan and, while it was in forbearance (principal deferred until my son finished college), we were making quarterly interest payments. For reasons nobody ever explained to us, AES switched the invoices for those quarterly payments to a format with a big watermark reading THIS IS NOT A BILL and $0.00 shown as the amount due. Still, in very small print above the invoice section, it stated that you could make interest payments if you wanted to. I had arranged the loans, but my wife normally handles the bills, so when these arrived she simply filed them, assuming they were some sort of status statement. Because the payments were quarterly, a full year went by before I sensed something was off with the loan balance. It was more confusing because we also had a direct student loan in my son's name with AES, whose invoices had not changed and on which we kept paying.
For OVER SIX MONTHS I tried to get account information from AES to learn the true status of the PLUS loan. On each contact they either supplied incorrect information or promised to get back to me and never did. This incompetence lasted so long that the unpaid interest was capitalized into the loan principal, creating further unjustified interest. I paid off the original principal and sued them in civil court for the unjustified interest. They asked the court to move the case to Harrisburg, knowing I would struggle to act as my own lawyer 250 miles from home. The request was granted, and I had to drop the suit. The bottom line, folks, is that this company is incompetent and unethical, and you should AVOID DOING BUSINESS WITH THEM at all costs!!!
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