iPhone Upgrade. Citizen One - loan payments

When you call the CitizensOne help line at 888-201-6306 be patient, If you do not have your loan number, as most of us don't, do not select any prompts. Let it timeout and finally ask "if you do not have your account number, please select *'. At that point select * and you will get routed to a person. I had a very nice and helpful person that was able to add my new credit card number. The VRU is worthless ****, but the people are very nice.

Another tip is if you ARE able to finally get your loan # which was genius tip going to the Apple store finding your invoice & printing (PDF) & it's actually is on the bottom of the invoice. Why would they hide it like this? And why isn't there a greetings email from Citizens One thanking you for your loan request?? Every lender whether it's auto, mortgage does this once you open a new loan. They give you a courtesy "Hello" greeting email giving you your info. Apple as big & as much money the make needs to get with a larger bank like a BOFA or Chase or Wells Fargo. This little "mom & pop" bank has a garbage website.

Anyway, I tried several attempts trying to "change my payment type" I ordered my iPhone X on a credit card for that "Just in case" something goes wrong nothings coming out of my actual checking account. Now that everything is set up & my first payment has already gone through I wanted to change the monthly payment to come out of my bank account instead. Well they don't tell you that you cannot "load" a debit card! I just figured this out on my own, if you want it to come out of your checking/savings you need to add your account # & ABA which is just weird??? Who doesn't take a debit card as form of auto payment anymore?? It's almost 2018??

Oh just setting up your account is a pain in the *** too! Some of the input fields only allow caps, other fields only allow certain characters but it doesn't show you what, there's no direction so after like 10 attempts it finally took!

Citizen One just a HORRIBLE banking institution that's still operating in 1995!!

I received this email message yesterday, Spetember 21, 2017 from Citizen One:

We were unable to successfully process your initial payment for your loan number ending in 5325.

Please call 888-201-6306

to update your payment information.

When I called, after a quite annoying dance with their answering system, I was told I needed to go to Apple to update my credit card number. It clearly says to call Citizen One to update the payment information, and I had quite a testy conversation with the person I finally got on the phone. These are not user friendly people --too bad they have a lock on the Apple payment plan system.

The previous response above did help quite a bit with getting through to a real person at Citizen, so thanks.

Diane in Bellaire, Texas

Hey, my friend is having the same problem. His payment method is fine with every other charges like bills and student loan payment. But since May, he has been getting payment method failed error emails and so he called customer service and made sure he paid all the remaining balance over the phone and got a confirmation number. His payment method was charged the amount of the remaining balance, but after a month, he got it back on his back account and got emails from citizens one saying payment method failed and payment returned and now they say his balance is overdue (because they were not able to charge for the past few months, which should not be the case because the same payment method is used everywhere else successfully and has enough funds) and the remaining balance now increased due to the interest over these "overdue" months. He has called customer service twice already and every time they say they will process the payment over the phone and that it takes 7 - 10 business days to confirm payment.

How did it resolve for you?

Ok, I discovered the solution.

1) Call Citizens One at 1-888-201-6306

2) When automated system asks for your 16 digit loan number just don't enter anything or say anything.

3) After asking you 3 or so times for the 16 digit loan number, the system will say We still haven't gotten your information, please hold for the next representative.

4) The rep can look up your loan number by your name after confirming your identity. Make sure to also ask for the amount of the first payment you made, because when you try to set up your online account it will ask you the amount of your first loan payment as an identity verification question.

If I were Apple, I would lean on CitizenOne to provide the stellar service that Apple customers are used to. Either that or dump them. Their service borders on the worst I have experienced with a financial company in 50 years. They were the finance company Apple recommended to me. They are so bad that they will definitely impact my decision to purchase a new phone from Apple in the future. One of my experiences follows:

I purchased an Apple 6 cell phone from Apple and used Apple recommended CitizenOne as the finance company. I wanted a receipt from CitizenOne every month to confirm payment and claim my business phone costs. Originally CitizenOne used to send out receipts by email. They stopped doing that about 6 months ago and I had to go through the same steps that are described above (Call Apple, Call CitizenOne, Call the Apple Store that I purchased the phone from).

I finally got to the right number at CitizenOne with the right account number and asked what happened to their email receipts. They said they stopped email receipts but I should log into their website - which from recollection does not offer receipts but does offer the ability to list payment history. This mechanism worked for several more months.

For the past three months their web site has been impossible to log into. With Safari - after logging in I just get a white page. If I use Firefox the page lists HTML errors and stops with them and a blank page. If I use Chrome - I think I get a white page. Tried to access both from a Mac (Safari, Chrome, Opera, Firefox) and from a PC (Edge, Explorer, Chrome, Firefox) without success.

When I called CitizenOne and asked how to get a receipt the representative's response was:

1) Log into the web site

2) When I said it did not work they suggested to delete all cookies

3) Tried it and it did not work. Plus it is really inconvenient to do that every month - even more so if it does not lead to a solution

I escalated to CitizenOne management. They said ... oh sorry our web site was being worked on over the weekend and is still not up (I called on a Tuesday). They said they would mail me a receipt.

1) That their web site has only had trouble over the weekend is BS because this has been going on for months

2) I believe it is a legal imperative that they offer a receipt to customers when requested.

3) I do not believe that I am the only customer experiencing this problem

4) I made the calls described above for last month's receipt on Tuesday this week. It is now Wednesday. Maybe I will get the receipt by mail ... maybe I will not. Time will tell.

It's been over a year and their site still doesn't work. I just went through this whole disaster, and when i asked Apple chat for help, they literally hung up on me. I can't believe I spent so much money with this company.

How do I see my I phone 6s loan docs?

Yesssss!!! Thank you!

I had this problem too - I had to call the apple store where I bought the phone and have them send me a duplicate receipt. The loan agreement number is at the very bottom. When I called the apple store they told me they have nothing to do with citizens one and that the loan agreement number wasn't on there, they sent the receipt anyways and lo and behold, it was in fact on there. Pretty annoying that citizens one can't look you up by name/number/last 4 digits of the loan agreement, but at least there's a somewhat easy way to track it down.

Really is kind of a grind here to try and change credit cards from an expiring one. Absolute POC website at CitizenOne. Still haven't got thru their lame account creation site. Each time I try and register the account I get a blank page after agreement to their terms. Try a different browser (firefox) this gives an XHTML error. Plus, I purchased two phones... two accounts. Lord help me…. *****

<Edited by Host>

Late to the game here, but maybe this will help someone else. Ironically, mobile Safari can't be used to register. Firefox did not work either but finally, Chrome (iPad) worked. Regarding account info, I saved the letter from Citizens One which I received shortly after I purchased the phone. It had the account number and my first payment.

This works--I had no clue what this was when I got the email. My card expired I had on file, but the email was so vague and the site was terrible....I didn't know if it was real. This is the # that is on the receipt from the Apple store if you have it handy.

reply to pwabub: Your post was and is spot on. If by my own choice, I would have never used Citizen One. I never know when I'm going to receive a loan statements...they seem to come across about twice per year. And online access is a joke.

I have received notices from Apple that I can upgrade to a new phone, but I can't get into Citizen One to check when my last payment should have been made--yet they keep billing me. When I tried to check into their phone, a recording says they can't answer any questions about iPhone loans or upgrade programs!