This evening I completed writing a 6-page letter to the Better Business Bureau as a f/u to a complaint I made in September against Ocwen Federal Bank, FSB. A search for something else I was looking for about Ocwen led me to "The Rip-off Report"
I couldn't believe so many of you have had the same horrible experiences we have with Ocwen. They seem to have a standard practice of assessing late fees for payments sent on time, not sending statements showing account activity and using Notices of Default in the way other companies send reminder notices. And of course, since they send no statements, you only find out about the incorrect dates payments are credited when you see the late fees on the Notice of Default!
The amount of aggravation and frustration in trying to deal with them is ridiculous. And the time involved! My letter to the BBB was in answer to the response Ocwen had made to my complaint. It took six pages using a 12 point font in Word to answer Ocwen's response because there were so many inaccuracies in it. Additionally, they had sent me a previous letter covering much of the same thing and their latest response had multiple direct conflicts with the prior letter. Addressing each inaccuracy is so tedious and time consuming I'm sure people frequently just give up.
My initial problem started after receiving a Notice of default last November. Any of you that have received this know how upsetting this is. I picked it up at the post office the day after it was delivered because it was sent by registered mail and we had been at work so they just left to slip to come in for it. I'll never forget it. I opened it in the car at the post office and it took probably half an hour before I was calm enough to drive home. We were not in default and I knew that. However, seeing those words in the Notice is terrifying.
After getting the Notice, with shaking hands, you call the number listed on the letter and send letters disputing the debt and disputing the late fees they add for payments you know were submitted in more than enough time but they say were late. The responses from Ocwen make the whole situation even better. They seemed to imply we were completely dim-witted (which I guess we were in having a loan with them). They frequently cite past late payments when trying to explain inappropriate late fees that were assessed. The implication they make is that if you previously made a payment after the grace period, you automatically are a liar and should pay any fees they wish to impose. Of course they don't address the fact you included the late fee with the payment when it was late or feel they need to explain why it takes 2 to 4 weeks to credit payments you mail.
I would say our loan with Ocwen was the single most financial mistake we ever made. It started with another company, a $40,000-20 year-2nd mortgage with $4000 in fees, initially quoted at 10%, which actually became 13.99% with an APR of 15.59%. Ocwen bought the loan after about only 2 months. We had the loan a little over 4 years, paid $1000 in payments prior to Ocwen buying it and paid Ocwen over $22,000. We have just re-financed the loan in September and the pay-off was $40,890. Not bad, huh?
Trying to get pay-off info is another tremendously fun thing to do with Ocwen. We had to guesstimate ours when trying to determine a specific amount for our new loan. Requests for pay-off we were told must be in writing, are not ever given by phone and have several fees involved. We did not see the final pay-off amount until the day we signed the new loan papers, our loan agent had only received them 2 days prior. And guess what? The amount was over $2000 more than we were anticipating. We signed our new loan papers on September 11,2002 and it funded on September 20th. The due date for my Ocwen loan was the 12th with a 10 day grace period. As you can imagine, they did not post pay-off until Sept. 24th so we were assessed one more late fee! I was actually unaware they had done this until reading Ocwen's response to my complaint with the BBB. I don't know why I was surprized.
I know how you feel
Los Angeles, California
Why file a report here? Ripoff Report is a permanent record! Other complaint sites copy our content then remove reports for money.
