LenCred, Inc.

Review: TOTAL SCAM!!!!!! [redacted] at the Bentonville, AR office "conveniently" failed to mention the 12% fee based off amount of line of credit approved for. I was told the only fee I have to pay is the $50 upfront fee to pull credit and monitor account. I would have never agreed to the upfront fee if the 12% additional fee had been mentioned from the start. I was told the ONLY fee I have to pay is to pull credit and monitor the report.Desired Settlement: Hawkeye Management needs to refund the $29.95 fee Transunion charged to my account, and the fee to monitor my credit. I would have NEVER agreed to these fees if I had been told upfront about the 12% fee [redacted] failed to mention to me by telling me I only pay a $50 fee. Hawkeye Management needs to refund my credit card for the $50 they are charging me on the two fees mentioned.

Business

Response:

Thank you for your letter regarding the complaint against Hawkeye Management. We at Hawkeye Management take pride in our high standards of our products / services and our people. I would like to apologize for the misunderstanding regarding our program. Apparently, the problem was the result of a misunderstanding with our prequalification process and our program.

Mr. [redacted] came to Hawkeye Management in search for capital for his business and as a result of questions presented in our prequalification process he did not qualify. Mr. [redacted] suggested we use his Business Partner to continue our prequalification process. As always there are no fees paid to Hawkeye unless funding is achieved. We did use the terms that these were the only fees and did not do a good job of separating the prequalification process vs the funding process. Our resource center’s only job is to get the client’s credit information to qualify them for the free consultation we offer with one of our advisors.

Of course we have fees for our various funding programs if a client chooses to go forward when they are qualified. The client never contacted us to tell us he felt we misled him or we would have rectified this immediately. We will certainly refund Mr [redacted] cost for his credit report and we have covered this with our associates to ensure we do a better job at our explanations in the future.

Consumer

Response:

[A default letter is provided here which indicates your acceptance of the business's response. If you wish, you may update it before sending it.]

I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID [redacted], and find that this resolution is satisfactory to me.

Regards,

Professional, efficient and expedient service!

Review: Lencred is a company who assists people in getting a loan. I was trying to purchase a franchise and I was referred to them to get assistance.

I was told they had relationships with several banks and Lencred could get me a unsecured loan.

I was told because I had excellent credit I could obtain a loan under 10% and it would not appear on the three major credit reporting agencies; Lencred would obtain a loan for me in my company's business name.

Lencred fee was to bill me for ten percent of the amount of the loan I obtained. They switched me to applying for credit cards in my business name.

I was not involved in the choosing of the institution of credit card. the APR rate or informed in any way of the terms and condition of the credit card. I was not allowed to choose any condition such as annual fees.

I have not activated the credit cards because if I were to use them at the APR that was issued to me I believe I would not be able to repay.

Lencred did not help me in any way in improving my credit nor help me obtain a loan.

Before I decided to use Lencred services I told them I went to my bank , BMO Harris and I applied for the same product Lencred was offering; a business credit card. I obtained a business credit for $15,000 at 15.99 percent APR. I was not happy with the APR or terms.

Lencred followed up with me and I was promised Lencred could assist me in getting credit cards under ten percent.

On April 15 Lencred billed my American Express $150. After that I was informed they obtained my more credit cards with more than one institution. I was never told about any of the terms and conditions of the credit cards.

On April 28 my American Express was charged $1100 by a company at the same address as Lencred but on my statement the company was called BLS.

I was charged for the credit cards before I saw the terms. I should be allowed to return these cards back to the institution if I never activated the card.Desired Settlement: Refund the amount I was charged on my American Express. I have filed a dispute with American Express.

Even with my normally cynical perspective in tact, Lencred did a great job of getting us the financing we needed within a very short time frame. Their communication was professional, quick, responsive and polite. Lencred went out of their way to ensure we understood each step along the way and they stuck to everything they said. In the world of finance, keeping your word is extremely valuable and I was very impressed with the integrity offered by the Lencred team.

I found LenCred extremely easy to deal with. If I had a question, they answered it quickly. They were always pleasant and made me feel at ease. Thank you very much and I would definitely recommend LenCred. They have helped me realize my dream :) Thank you Lord for Lencred :)
Bill [redacted]

Review: I was sold a service that will take off negative items from my credit report. I paid $650 for this service. I asked for this service to be started on August 2nd, 2013. [redacted] told me that these inquires will be taken off within 2 weeks, and that their "guy" takes them off within 72 hours. Not only did it NOT take less than two weeks (the inquiries were taken off on August 22nd), not all the inquiries were taken off. Due to this, I have not been able to find financing for my small business. [redacted] over promised...and they completely under delivered. I have had only 1 new inquiry during time as I was getting a new phone provider.

During this process, [redacted] has been very rude and condescending, completely void of any professionalism in this matter.Desired Settlement: My entire money to be refunded.

Business

Response:

Mr. [redacted] came to us through a referral partner of ours, [redacted] from Midas Financial. He was seeking funding to become a partner of [redacted]'s. There were some misunderstandings right from the start about our services but those were cleared up by our Director of Referral Partner Relations and Mr. [redacted] decided to move forward in our program. Mr. [redacted] returned signed disclosures and we began our plan to move him forward. Upon inspection of his credit report he had one credit concern that we suggested be addressed. We referred him to a third party to resolve that credit issue but we have Worked with this company for over 3 years and We did collect the payment and act as the intermediary.

As Mr. [redacted] stated, it did take longer than usual and longer than we expected for the credit issue to get resolved by our third party credit vendor. We did ultimately complete the work exactly as planned but Mr. [redacted] is 100% correct that it took us longer than we originally expected. We also did not follow our policy and allow Mr. [redacted] to talk to upper management about his concern and frustration. This is where we made our biggest mistake.

So we will issue a full, 100% refund to Mr. [redacted] for not following our own policies and not treating him as the valued client that he is to us. Our vendor did complete the work we hired him to do as a subcontractor but we failed to allow Mr. [redacted] to take his complaint to the proper people when he became unhappy.

Review: I signed up with a company called LenCred. This company made a clear promise to help apply for and get me approved for small business credit.

The company website shows their promise:

http://www.lencred.com/

"We will help you get setup with freely spendable business credit lines that can be spent on anything your business requires to operate & grow – not just gas or store branded credit. Get the working capital you need today & ask us about getting your funding WITHOUT pledging collateral."

The company has applied for and I have received multiple personal credit cards. This includes duplicate personal cards that I already have. The company promised to apply for business credit, and has applied for personal credit. This has hurt my credit and was not what the company promised. I have multiple credit inquiries and personal credit cards showing on my personal credit. My credit score has dropped over 100 points.Desired Settlement: Pay $2111 for all fees charged and other companies signed up for with the program

Whatever is possible to repair my credit by removing the inquires and personal credit cards that were approved and showing up on my credit.

Business

Response:

We’re sorry that [redacted] is unhappy with our services. We have done lots of work over the years and have several employees who work really hard every day to bring services to our clients that have value and that helps our clients achieve some of their funding goals. We’ve grown from a one man operation to a company of over 40 people in the last 7 years. This is relevant because in order to grow like that and serve over ten thousand interested business owners annually in each of the last several years companies like ours need to develop systems and processes to support service to those people. We relied on those same communication systems and processes with [redacted] that we’ve developed and that have worked for thousands of other prospects and clients. We looked to see if there was a breakdown with [redacted] and here’s what we found: LenCred did a consultation on February 19, 2015 At 4:00 p.m. for [redacted]. Based on [redacted] qualifications he was matched with a credit card funding program as his best funding option. In reviewing our call history with LenCred (as all of our calls are recorded and monitored for quality purposes), we have verified that this client was notified a number of times that he would receive a combination of personal and business credit cards during our program. This is standard and common for us – just was we’ve done for thousands of our clients over the last 7 years. The first time he was notified was when he had his consultation with his advisor on February 19, 2015 and the funding program he qualified for was explained to the client. The client told his Advisor that he understood and was fine to proceed with our LenCred funding program. At this time, the Advisor sent the client disclosures to his email address for him to complete and send back to begin the funding process. When the client was reviewing the disclosures, it does state throughout that LenCred will obtain business and personal credit cards for the client. At the end of signing all of the disclosures, we have another page called a “check list”. This page requires the client to initial by each statement that they understand the procedures and policies for the funding program which do include receiving personal and business cards. After this was turned into LenCred, the client is then scheduled for a compliance call with our compliance officer to go over the disclosures again before the funding process begins. When this client spoke with our Compliance Officer, on a recorded phone call, he did agree that he understood he would be receiving personal and business credit cards from the LenCred funding program he was qualified for. I think it’s also important to address the claims by [redacted] that his credit score dropped by more than 100 points. The FICO scoring model only puts a 10% value on inquiries. That scoring range is 300 to 850 so that’s a 550 point window. It’s simply not mathematically possible for someone’s FICO score to drop by 100 points because of some credit inquiries. So, while we would genuinely like to resolve this matter with [redacted], his statements about how we negatively impacted his credit scores are simply not true and not even mathematically possible. Additionally, we use a highly data-driven methodology when assisting clients with their funding and nearly all of our clients see between minimal and no negative impact on their credit profiles when working with us. In fact, the majority of our clients over the years have enhanced the quality of their personal credit through our funding plans. In [redacted] case he has increased his available revolving credit which has a far greater positive impact on his credit scores than a few inquiries spread out across multiple bureaus could ever have. LenCred has followed our contract 100% as we discussed with [redacted]. We were able to acquire at least 3 business credit cards on his behalf and we also assisted him with at least 3 personal credit card approvals. It is possible that he received other business credit lines but he became unresponsive to us and we were unable to finish our funding plan with [redacted]. We would like a chance to resolve the matter with [redacted] but we have not been able to communicate with him. This complaint was filed after numerous attempts on our part to communicate with [redacted] and to get him to complete his part of our agreement. Please let us know if there is anything else we can do to resolve this matter. We would gladly work directly with [redacted] or move to arbitration or whatever next step [redacted] would like to take.

One word to describe LenCred customer service = STELLAR!!! It started with the initial phone conversation with Sean [redacted], Senior Advisor explaining the nuances of business credit in terms that I could easily understand (As being new to all this).
Every member of the team is professional and curtious during our encounters and they quickly found lines of credit to get my business started. All emails/phone calls/texts are met with quick and very helpful responses. Sean [redacted] continues to be a guiding light listening to my concerns and giving great advice that's allowing me to continue to grow in my business. It feels like a great partnership!!! The future feels very promising for my business with LenCred and Sean [redacted] as a partner for success!!!