Payment freeze promise not honored with resultant legal threats.

I'm really without words. Yet again MFC proved that their client's are just a number, nothing else. I went under voluntary debt review early 2019, biggest mistake of my life but that's a story for another time. January 2020 I canceled my service agreement with my debt counselor and started paying my creditors directly. In February I noticed that I was in arrears with half a payment on my wife's car. Strange how this could've happened with me paying my debt counselor and them distributing the funds before January 2020. I agreed to settle the arrears and the in March the lockdown hit. My business was not allowed to open seeing that I do not provide an essential service (motor industry) I was stuck without any income for close to 2 months. I had to retrench my employees and had no idea how we would survive the lockdown without any income to buy food, nevermind pay vehicle installments. I tried contacting MFC the first time on the 20th of April to try and make some kind of arrangement since I could not pay my installments at the end of March and April was definitely out of the question. Even by getting a essential service permit towards the end of April did not mean everything was going to be normal all at once. With the economy suffering and me forced to operate my business all on my one I was surely not going to showing my usual turnover for months to come. With no luck getting any feedback I contacted a lady with whom I previously had email contact with regards to my "my accounts" function that was disabled. She then forwarded my request to another person, Jakes Kolapen, who requested an affidavit from the SAPD that stated I was not earning any income and that he could arrange some sort of payment freeze for 2-3 months to get me back on my feet again. Circumstances didn't allow me to get into the Police station for 3 weeks (only one in our little town) and as soon as I did get the affidavit I scanned and emailed it back to him......no reply except for text messages, registered letters and emails threatening me with legal action and that I would be forced to voluntarily hand MFC back my vehicles. At this stage I had already paid 2 payments of R2000 on each of the vehicles, which was all I could sc**** together. At the end of June I made another payment of R2000 on each of the accounts, all of which would've been enough to cover the arrears should I have received the promised payment freeze I was promised on time. On the 1st of July I was contacted by Ella from Rizo collections (or something) and I explained the situation to her as well. She asked me to forward her the affidavit which I did immediately with a 3 month bank statement of my company proving income loss. A few days passed before Rachel called me and, in my opinion, went at me quite arrogantly and asked me what the issue was for me not making any payments. Again I explained her the whole scenario. With no regards to my situation she even made a comment "This cannot go on, you cannot pay 26 years on a vehicle" and with regards to my bankstatement "there was a substantial amount paid into this account in March, why didn't you use that to pay your installments?" I then tried to explain to her that she was looking at my Business bank statement and that the "substantial" amount was not even 10% of my normal turnover and that that amount, was from an invoice from February, of which parts still needed to be paid, and I still needed to feed my family out of it. Vehicle installments just was not any priority then, survival was.

In any case, I received my statements today. Another installment has been added to the arrears, no sign of a payment freeze or any assistance whatsoever.

I'm disgusted and appalled. The problem I had was caused by a nationwide shutdown due to a worldwide pandemic, not because of me defaulting at will.

Best of all, 4 members of my household has tested positive for Covid-19 since the 23rd of June, including my wife, mother and 2 sons. Since the first results came in on the 25th of June we had to self-isolate, meaning that my business had been halted once again with no source of income. I am grateful that we are all healthy and everyone made full recoveries so I'm taking life head on, with or without MFC's help.