Cox Mobile Discount Deal is a Fraud in Conspiracy with Citizens Pay

The day before Thanksgiving, I purchased two iPhone 16 Pros through the "Cox Discount Program".  I quickly discovered that Cox Mobile (Cox), Citizens Pay (Citizens), which is part of Citizens Bank, and Equifax, conspired to create a program that is a fraud.  In order to avoid the illusion of a 24-month service lock, they created a fake 24-month line of credit (LOC) from Citizens in the name of the customer, with an amount equal to the discount going to Cox Mobile.  Cox claims to pay the discount in 24 monthly payments on the customer's loan.  The immediate impact of this fraud is to negatively impact the customer's credit score.

I have spoken to several Cox and Citizens individuals (including 2 Cox supervisors and 2 Citizens Supervisors) and Citizens Bank Corporate Customer Service Department.  So far both parties claim the other is responsible for this program.  My next action will be filing complaints with the California Attorney General, Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, Better Business Bureau, and Public Utility Commission.  In addition, this complaint will be filed with the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  I will be providing deals of this scam to all news agencies and as many message boards related to Cox and Citizens as possible.  Lastly, I am going to be contacting elected officials to work with them to create legislation to ban this form of scam in California and Nationally.

The discount program in reality is just a two-year service lock disguised as a fake loan.  The fake loan amount is the full purchase price of the phone(s) in the name of the Cox customer.  The fact is the customer borrows the funds for Cox and is responsible for repaying the loan if Cox does not make the monthly discount payment or makes their monthly payment late.

Cox and Citizens created this fake loan so Cox can use borrowed funds to purchase the phones from the manufacturer and pass the liability for the loan to the customer.  Therefore, Cox can pay the discount off over 24 months and have no liability for the borrowed funds.  In fact, the customer has guaranteed the loan to Cox.  This isn’t even the most negative aspect to the Cox customer from this fake transaction.

The fake loan turns out to be an unrequested line of credit (LOC) for an amount greater than the borrowed funds.  In addition, the unused LOC can only be used for purchases from Cox Mobile.  The financing process uses Equifax to determine your creditworthiness and recommends the amount of LOC.

The LOC has several negative impacts on your credit score.  These negative items are: 1. an additional loan which will never come off your credit report, 2. the unused portion of the LOC will show up as additional available credit, even though you have virtually no use for it, and 3. the total minimum monthly payment (including the Cox discount portion) will reflect in the total amount of your monthly loan payments.

These are the most egregious aspects to this fraud of a program.  Other issues are Cox represented that the customer portion of the purchase price could be paid off at the beginning of the loan so that the loan would be immediately paid off.  The loan agreement and Citizens responded by saying any additional principal payment would not change the monthly minimum payment amount over the 24 months.  So, any additional principal payment would be duplicate paid over the life of the loan and the duplicate payment refunded at the end of the 24 months without interest.

When contacting Cox about these issues they said I needed to contact Citizens as they are the lender.  I contacted Citizens and they claimed the program was set up by Cox, so I need to contact Cox.  Even a Citizens’ Corporate Customer Service representative passed responsibility to Cox.  Therefore, it is readily apparent they have conspired to create this fraud and coordinated a process where neither party will assume responsibility.

There are an infinite number of responsible ways this program could be structured to accomplish the goals of locking customers for 24 months and providing the stated discount.  Unfortunately, this program, jointly created by Cox and Citizens is the worst-case scenario for Cox customers.  When I first got into the details of this fraud my thought was that the person who designed this piece of crap was a marketing person with no understanding of personal finances.  After multiple discussions with both parties, it became obvious the structure was intentionally designed so Cox customers assumed all the risk, responsibility and negative impact, while Cox assumes no liability.