Monday, November 18, 2013

Dear Wonga.... YOU FAILED !

I would like to openly discuss my experiences with Wonga, and go into some more detail about how its all worked out.

Many months back, in desperate need of a quick injection of cash, I resorted to Wonga. A friend had kindly helped me out of the bog of financial despair with them once, but I fucked up, plain and simple. Even more stupidly I missed my payment / renewal date, and was faced with paying it all off in one hit, or entering a 'payment agreement'.
Settling for the payment agreement I spoke with the team about it, and was very pleased with the experience setting it up. 2 months down the line my debit card was renewed and I screwed up and forgot to tell Wonga, so the payment failed.
I contacted them, apologised and gave them the new card details. Crisis averted, or so I though. The following month I recevied an email saying the payment had failed. I called up again, the agent had forgotten to save the card details. No big deal.
The next month, payment failed email again, I call up, this time its a system outage and the payment HAD gone through, but one system didn't tell another, so the email was sent.
Next month, payment failed, month after, payment failed.... I tried in vain to contact them to sort this out, emails, phone calls etc all covered in previous blog entries, but nothing worked.
On calling last month the agent took a payment over the phone without my authorisation, I complained but Wonga failed to get back to me, so with this I approached the Financial Ombudsman who have taken the matter on.

This month  I decided to be proactive, and called Wonga a week before the payment was due. Went through it all with the agent, and confirmed they had all the right details to take the payment on the due date.... This morning I get an email... PAYMENT FAILED! So this time, paranoid that something was wrong at the banks end, I called the bank.

First up  THANK YOU NatWest for having such a coherent bunch on both Twitter and phone banking, they are amazing to deal with and answered all my questions faultlessly and promptly.

In this conversation with NatWest it was confirmed to me that not only had no payment failed, but no payment has even been presented to them for authorisation.
Seriously Wonga, you are hassling, harassing, and upsetting me with emails saying I have in some way failed to keep up my end of the bargain, and YOU have not even asked my bank for the money.

As per my emails, YOUR MOVE !! I have called you, emailed you, tried to work with you to give you my money, the money I agreed to pay you after my own slip up..... Now its up to you. I will make NO further efforts to make payment this month until YOU contact me. I realise that you will probably ignore my emails about the matter like you did last month, and that the next things I will get are emails or letters saying you have cancelled the agreement, are going to add interest, and all other sorts of financial threats. Thats fine. IF you can't be bothered to engage with a customer to resolve matters of you OWN failures I will quite happily wait for this to reach County Court level, then explain to them the poor levels of customer contact you have, and produce the emails, and call logs of when I have tried to make payment and resolve the matter.

As a matter of principal I am no longer willing to waste my time trying to sort the matter out, and if it does require any further input from me, other than answering a call or email from yourselves, I will start to add admin fees.

So Wonga..... YOUR MOVE! I look forwards to hearing from you.

6 comments:

  1. Michael, how did you get on? I currently have a case with the Ombudsman. After a long wait they have replied, today to the Ombudsman trying to blame me and skirt around my complaint.

    It is poor service. I am preparing for court should I not be successful with the FO. Reply here if you'd like to chat.

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    1. Hi, sorry for the delay replying, I kept meaning to get around to it.
      One Wonga received my complaint via the ombudsman they contacted me to try and resolve the matter properly, as per my later blog entries.
      Eventually I paid the full amount and brought the payment plan to an end.
      Every time I see one of their adverts now it just makes me angry.
      Hope you get to the bottom of yours ASAP. If I can offer any advise, feel free to contact me.

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    2. Hi Michael. Sorry I'm not sure how to set up an alert to know when you reply. My loan is paid off, after a few months in an arrangement. Were you aware a 'payment agreement' with Wonga is displayed on a credit file differently to extensions / a renewal?

      Paid finally, after poor communications from Wonga.

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    3. Well thats good news, well done, glad you have got it sorted and freed yourself from the grasps of the money grabbing grannies of Wonga.
      Yeah I had noticed on my credit file that it appeared as a different kind of outstanding debt. Just a shame that them messing the payments up on that arrangement did me no favours in the end. Didn't realise that each loan and extension showed as a new entry, my record is a mile long now, but thankfully the all important numbers are ok now.

      Thanks for the update, hope you stay free of these troubles :)

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  2. Hi Michael

    Thank you - I've bookmarked this page so I can come back to it with any changes. I had similar issues of Wonga saying they attempted payment when they hadn't - court nay be the next option for me, as theFO didn't find in my favour. I'd be interested to know how they helped you, if at all.

    Although it's the customer who takes a loan, I can't see hiw Wonga can think 3 loans over a few mobths + loans from other payday lenders over the same period can be considered affordable, and issued in the 1st place.

    Did they tell you hoe an arrangement would appear on your credit file? (as oppose to an extension)

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  3. ..sorry, predictive text :-)

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