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.

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!

I never received any loan number for my phone purchase, and I can't seem to contact Citizens one cause going through the website u need ur loan number to access the account or anything on their page and when I tried calling the first thing it asks for is your loan number which again I don't have nor do I remember receiving one, it doesn't let me get any further til the loan number is punched in...??

I seem to recal that the number (that they seem to go out of their way to hide!!) is somewhere on the original apple purchase receipt for the phone. I had the same issue. And god help you if you need to call them... and don't get me started on their portal... it's one of the worst apps I've ever had the displeasure to use... probably website vintage 1994, I'd say. Disgraceful that Apple picked these folks to do all this business wth. must be a kickback from Citizen One somewhere to some Apple exec in there somewhere.

I know this isn't terribly helpful but I wanted to add my experience to this thread as well.

My first year with Citizen's One, I had to cancel a credit card due to fraud and totally forgot it was the one I had set up to auto-pay my loan. Yeah, completely my fault. Absolutely no notification at all except finally getting a letter from them claiming that I was past due and about to be sent for collections. Finally got that straightened out after a lot of red tape.

Now, when I went to log in I had to change an expired password. No problem - done. Then it had me re-verify my security questions. These are questions that I absolutely know the answers to and was positive in my response. Except they didnt work. Failed a couple times and after the two hour lockout finally said "I forgot my questions". Then I was prompted to re-enter my first payment amount. Again, shouldn't have been a problem as I saved a picture of my receipt for just this occasion. Except it didnt accept this amount as valid and now on another two hour lockout. I need to update some credit card info and their online system makes access extremely difficult. What an absolutely horrible customer experience with this company. I NEVER receive any kind of receipt or statement or anything of the sort. I'm pretty sure a lender is required to send out certain notifications and statements as part of their compliance requirements don't they? I can't believe Apple continues to partner with Citizen's One considering their high standards.

This worked great. Thanks. My card number had changed due to the bank changing it due to a retail fraud. The rep I talked to was pretty painless and helped me get the card changed for two different iphones.

On your receipt from when you purchased the phone, you will find the "loan ID" (it's a 16 digit number). Take that loan number to www.citizensoneloan.com and register it. It will walk you through setting up your account. I just did it, so I know this works. I have two accounts and was able to link them both to one login.

Hope this helps!

rs11942 was a perfect answer! I was calling CitizenOne to provide a different credit card number. Follow the steps in rs11942's reply. To add to that previous excellent answer: You have to provide your DOB and last 4 digits of your social so they can confirm your identity. Then the CSR gave me my loan number and amount of first payment to set it up online. I wanted to do the same for my husband's account but he was not available so he will have to call back himself. It's all good!

Avoid doing business with this bank at all costs. I'm actually surprised Apple would hitch their wagon to this antiquated company.

1) They have never successfully auto-processed a payment from my Suntrust checking account. The account and routing numbers have been verified and reverified, and are serving my mortgage, autoloans, and health insurance premium payments perfectly. However, once I place a call and wade through telephone customer support, they are able to manually process the payment.

2) They are one of about three payees in the entire United States that is unable to process a Mastercard debit card as a payment source. The IRS, my mortgage company, even rental car companies use this very same account number for payments and handle it perfectly well.

3) There is no way to pursue any resolution beyond what the CSR phone bank is able to provide. They're nice enough people, and I do my best not to be snotty with them, but the company they work for is a smoldering tire fire.

When the iPhone 7 dropped, I did the math nine ways to Sunday to find that the Apple-financed option resulted in the best combination of low (no) out-of-pocket and monthly payments. The cost, however, has been the monthly annoyance of a journey through a phone tree to ask a human to do the thing that their system can not.

A failed endevour all around, and one that Apple would do well to shed itself of.

I got my loan number in my email. Double check your email for the first one received by citizen one loan. you will also need to know what was the first amount they withdrew from your account in order to access it.

Hope that helps.

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?

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

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!!

https://citizensoneloan.fdecs.com

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.