Complaint Review: Option One Mortgage - Irvine California

Option One Mortgage, Predatory Lender?, Ivine California Your best option is to not use Option One. Why? Option One should be investigated for predatory lending practices. Im not sure you are aware of what the term Predatory Lending refers to. In your example below (each will be addressed) none of them give an example of a Predatory Lending practice. True Predatory Lending happens when a bank, finance co. etc seeks out the least sophisticated customer (as defined by law), loans them money, then uses their lack of knowledge, sophistication, ability to communicate etc to charge them excessive fees or bill them for hidden/undisclosed costs or services. See http://predatorylending.org/index.cfm for more information. Example One: Electronic Snafu caused electronic draft problem. I called Option One after getting a message a day before the draft was to take place. Asked Option One to try the draft the day after. Customer rep said "No problem if a draft doesn't initially go through we wait for a while and then try two more times." I asked them to call back if there was a problem. There is no bank that will allow a 3rd attempt on any transaction after it has been presented at least twice. These ACH transactions normally take 2-3 business days to clear your account. If the funds were going to be there the day after, there shouldnt have been an issue. I checked with my bank the following week. Option One had tried to draft the day that the bank had warned of issues surrounding electronic drafts. Option One tried three times in eight minutes (all unsuccessful). Since there was only one day until the payment would be late I called Option One and asked if I could pay by credit card (they had accepted this for fees at the beginning of my loan) they mentioned that they would only accept Western Union and it couldn't be an electronic transfer (even though that's how they do their bank drafts.) In any case of a returned item, no matter who is at fault, the practice with any organization is to request certified funds. Western Union Quick Collect is an excellent resource for collecting those funds. The only other option for payment would have been to mail a money order or cashiers check. Credit card payments are not accepted over the phone for any type of payment transaction. Specifically, when dealing with an item returned from the bank, a credit card payment would still not be a certified transaction because the charge can be disputed, and eventually charged back to Option One if you called them and claimed that you did not give them permission to do it. See Fair Credit Billing Inquiry Act. I drove for two hours and took the day off of work to pay them by the method they instructed and still got a late charge (which I was assured would be removed but two years later is still on record as being owed to them.) Later I received a letter mentioning that I needed to pay within 5 days or would get a late charge. The letter itself was dated the 10th, the postmark was dated for the 14th (they waited to send the notice a day before the money was due) Its always a good practice to just pay your payment by the due date. After all, thats why its a called a due date. A common misconception is that you have a Grace Period, when in reality all you have is 15 days to avoid a late charge. Your payments are still required to be there by the 1st. Im just wondering why you got the letter if you in fact did drive 2 hours to do the Western Union Quick Collect. Western Union funds are posted the day they are received. That should have prevented any late charges being billed even if you did it as late as 8:30 pm on the 16th. Example two: I am trying to refinance and get away from these clowns. Guess what, they lost the request for the payoff notice twice. Just so they could screw up the close on the loan and invalidate the paperwork that my bank wrote up. Its very easy to think one company might have it out for you, but if you look at this in the true scope that it is, you are one of hundreds of customers that ask for payoff requests in any given day. This could have been avoided by asking for it to be faxed while you were on the telephone or requesting it online at Optiononeonline.com. If you are in the process of refinancing, just like any mortgage loan, it can take a good 30 days to complete from pre-qualifying, to appraisal, from closing to funding. There are numerous steps in the process, but the one step that I am sure of is that they would have needed the payoff to know how much to make the check for. How did you get all the way to closing without knowing the payoff? Example three: Their customer service department hangs up on you when you ask them a difficult question or ask to talk to their legal department. Unless you had specific business with the Legal department, you will be hard pressed to talk to anyone at any bank or finance company associated with Legal affairs. If you have a specific inquiry, and you would like it addressed within the full protection the law allows, then I would encourage you in the future to just write in to the correspondence address. In that case Option One is legally required to respond and address your dispute in a specific amount of time. See Fair Credit Billing Inquiry Act. Im not sure who you spoke with in Customer Service, but personally I love a challenge, and I think most other representatives within the organization would agree, tough calls make our day go by faster. The only way anyone I know would have hung up on you is if your difficult question was laced with profanity. Our calls are monitored daily, hanging up on any customer for any other reason would never be tolerated.