A Scary Experience with AI on a Mortgage Payoff
AI stopped my last payment on a mortgage I had had for 30 years. OK. That was a good move. The amount normally paid was wrong for the last payment but since all my payments were on automatic, it took a while for me to find this out. I naturally thought I had paid on time, but a financial nightmare started.
After getting a letter quite a bit later I called. The AI on the phone said I owed $1,100. That made no sense. That false amount continued every time I called when AI answered the phone. The person I finally reached said I owed $4,000. I said, “Can we go over the figures?” She said, “It is what it is. Pay it.” image
I was not about to do that. So far, two different figures.
Finally I reached another real person who could go over the figures. It took her half an hour to get into the system. Why is that? Isn’t getting into the figures a primary function of a mortgage company’s computer system? Isn’t that an IT priority?
She gave me the real amounts. Different, of course, again. Someone else said I could send a check through the extremely slow Georgia mail system. No bank drafts, no credit cards. The check arrived but they did not cash it or call me and tell me they wouldn’t cash it.
A bird in the hand? No. They don’t want checks, they want money orders.
Bottom line — all of this made the payment late. So they reported to the credit bureaus that I was delinquent — ON A MORTGAGE? That is death for your credit for 7 years to come. Never again will you get a mortgage.
The final AI driven blow — as soon as we resolved this and it was paid off to their satisfaction I was instantly erased from the AI system run by the phone, as if the loan did not exist. When an underwriter called trying to determine that it had indeed been paid off there was no recognition of my loan number when she punched it in, nor of my phone number attached to my account.
So DO YOU REALLY WANT 19 YEAR OLD I.T. GUYS RUNNING OUR MORTGAGES WHEN THEY HAVE NEVER OWNED A HOME, NEVER DEALT WITH REAL PEOPLE AND SPEND THEIR EVENINGS PLAYING VIDEO GAMES WHERE NOTHING ON THE SCREEN EXISTS IN THE REAL WORLD?
If you were a seasoned adult you would not treat a customer who had not missed a single payment in 30 years like this. If AI did it on automatic, who installed the “garbage in, garbage out” commands that made this happen?