Federal Agencies Are Quietly Burying Your Credit Report Complaints
In early October, Lorena Halseth needed a new car. Her Subaru had over 100,000 miles, and it was a gas guzzler. As an employee at a Toyota dealership near her home in South Carolina, she was excited to lock in a deal on a fuel-efficient Camry.
When the sales team pulled her credit, she was expecting a score of about 750 — close to what it was the last time she checked. What came back shocked her.
“I panicked. I had a little mental breakdown, so I called my boyfriend,” Halseth, 48, tells Money. “According to Equifax, I’m dead. Now what?”
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Mistakes on credit reports can be financially devastating. Aside from determining eligibility for and rates on products like loans and credit cards, these consumer reports are increasingly used by employers, landlords, insurers and other gatekeepers to the necessities of modern-day life.
Unfortunately, major errors like Halseth’s are not unique.
“There’s literally a category for this called ‘deceased cases’,” says Chi Chi Wu, attorney and director of consumer reporting and data accuracy at the nonprofit National Consumer Law Center. “This happens on a regular basis.”
Just how common is difficult to say, though, as complaints are getting harder to track. A Money investigation has discovered that two federal agencies in charge of monitoring and helping Americans with credit-reporting issues — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) — seem to be burying complaints lodged against the credit bureaus.
For Halseth, the error cost more than her new car. Her credit score has been effectively erased, putting her financial life on hold for eight months and counting. She has spent hours mailing letters and filing lawsuits in a desperate attempt to prove that she is, in fact, alive.
Without the help of federal watchdogs, everyday people like Halseth are increasingly left to fend for themselves.
A million missing credit complaints
Credit complaints are formal filings anyone can make after experiencing issues with their credit reports, including incorrect, outdated or irrelevant information. Complaints can also be about the credit bureaus themselves if they fail to quickly respond to disputes or provide free credit reports, as they are legally required to.
They serve as a rare method of recourse in an otherwise opaque system. In 2024, the FTC received a record-shattering 1.3 million complaints from Americans about issues with their credit reports, marking an 89% increase from the previous year.
These figures come from the agency’s Consumer Sentinel Network, a massive database of aggregated complaints created in 1997. The database, primarily used by law enforcement, also includes grievances about financial scams, fraud and identity theft.
The CFPB has consistently been one of the FTC’s largest data partners since 2011.
Whereas the CFPB collects largely unfiltered complaints through its Consumer Complaint Database and forwards them to the accused companies for resolution, the FTC aggregates complaints from several sources, processes and publishes them by state, topic and other factors so law enforcement, legislators and researchers can track trends in emerging financial crimes facing everyday Americans.
Historically, the databases — the Consumer Sentinel Network and the Consumer Complaint Database — have operated as two sides of the same consumer-protection coin.
In recent years, however, both federal agencies have been backing away from tracking and resolving formal complaints against the credit bureaus, particularly the “Big Three” of Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.
For instance, the FTC published in April fewer than 100,000 credit-report complaints for all of 2025 — roughly 1.2 million fewer than the year prior. The drop-off accounts for a 93% decline following consecutive years of staggering increases.
But the decrease isn't because Americans suddenly reported fewer issues with their credit reports. Rather, Money discovered that the drastic decline was the result of the CFPB and FTC quietly severing a longstanding data-sharing relationship for credit reporting complaints.
According to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, a sweeping financial reform law that created the CFPB, the watchdog agency is explicitly required to share that data with the FTC. Before now, neither agency has disclosed the end of the complaint-sharing agreement publicly, and the near-total stoppage of complaints was not noted in the FTC’s April update.
“We are no longer receiving consumer complaints about credit reports from the CFPB, but the agency still provides other data,” an FTC spokesperson says in an email to Money about the drop-off in credit complaints. The agency did not respond on the record to follow-up questions.
According to FTC officials from both the Biden and Trump administrations, the policy shift started as a cost-saving measure toward the end of the Biden administration and remains in effect today. The CFPB did not respond to Money’s request for comment on the arrangement.
Where You Can Fix Your Credit Right Now
CFPB limits new credit complaints
As for the CFPB, it's no secret that the Trump administration has decimated the watchdog agency. The president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed CFPB funding by about half, and the agency’s director, Russ Vought, has laid off hundreds of staffers.
Initially, advocates were worried the hobbled CFPB would not have the resources to assist consumers. Now, they’re watching the agency actively push them away.
For people in Halseth's shoes, bureaucratic changes like this could be the difference between getting a speedy resolution to credit errors and a showdown with the credit bureaus that lasts months or even years and requires professional legal aid to boot.
In February, the CFPB began rolling out notices on its website that claim that consumers are legally required to first dispute credit reporting issues with the bureaus and wait 45 days before submitting a CFPB complaint.
“Have you submitted your dispute to a credit reporting agency more than 45 days ago, or is your dispute with them no longer pending? If not, do not submit your complaint here at this time,” the CFPB website now states in a full-page alert in capital letters.
Two additional pages of warnings regarding credit reporting complaints appear before someone actually reaches the complaint page — regardless of whether their complaint is about credit reports or another financial product.
What’s more, no law bars consumers from submitting CFPB complaints first, consumer advocates and legal experts say, noting that the intimidating warnings themselves are legally dubious. In a March letter to the CFPB, the NCLC called them “heavy-handed, duplicative and menacing.”
“This appears to be an effort to stifle complaints,“ Wu said in a news release at the time. “People with complaints about their credit reports can choose … where to complain first.”
These changes to the CFPB’s complaint system may have come at the direct recommendation of the Consumer Data Industry Association, a group that lobbies on behalf of the credit bureaus. A Jan. 27 letter from the lobbying group specifically asks the CFPB to add a “prominent notice at the beginning of the complaint process,” warning of the wait time and criminal prosecution for submitting incorrect information in the complaint. Days later, the warnings appeared on the CFPB site.
The group also called for several other restrictions on complaints. As of mid-May, the CFPB now requires someone to register an account — which requests a full name, birth date, verified phone number and email address — before submitting a complaint.
Without strong federal oversight from either the FTC or the CFPB, “the credit bureaus feel emboldened to ignore” consumer complaints, Wu says.
The available data bears this out. An investigation from ProPublica, a nonprofit publication, found that since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, most credit-report complaints were closed without relief for the consumer in the form of monetary compensation or a corrected credit report.
Money independently verified the trend. We confirmed that of the 6.7 million CFPB credit-report complaints filed between January 2025 and April 2026, 56% were closed by the bureaus without relief.
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Fighting the credit bureaus alone
For Halseth back in South Carolina, the battle to correct her credit report continues.
After her mom died two years ago, Halseth began to handle the affairs. Following a decade of caregiving for a parent with dementia, Halseth thought the hard part was over. Instead, it was just ramping up.
While engaging with probate court and all the other “stuff nobody tells you about that you're going to be dealing with after a parent dies,” Halseth was receiving 15 to 20 credit offers a day in the mail for her deceased mom. The offers were a constant reminder of her mother — and not a positive one. She says they sparked nightmares her mom had “risen from the dead and taken out a bunch of credit cards.”
“Everybody has their own grieving process, but getting inundated with all these different credit offers was insulting,” she says. “You just want to move on.”
So she contacted the three major credit bureaus with her mom’s death certificate. Rather than closing out files belonging to her mother — who had a different name and Social Security number — the bureaus misunderstood the request. They ended up marking Halseth’s own file as deceased.
One bureau later confirmed this in a letter, which was reviewed by Money. It was addressed to Lorena Halseth, thanking her for reaching out and confirming that it had marked Lorena Hasleth’s file as deceased.
Ever since then, Halseth has been cut off from anything that checks her credit report, though the error did not affect her existing accounts. So her credit card and mortgage payments? Those are still due.
To fight the bureaus, Halseth hired a lawyer who specializes in consumer reporting issues. So far, she has settled two cases, and the one against Equifax is ongoing.
Frank Kerney, co-founder of The Consumer Lawyers and Halseth’s legal counsel, says cases with obviously false information on credit reports are more common than most people think — and the problem appears to be getting worse as the FTC and CFPB have pulled back on holding the credit bureaus accountable.
“The American Dream only works if you have the right credit score," he says.
Anecdotally, Kerney's firm — which is based in Tampa, Florida, but operates nationally — is receiving more calls this year than ever. Firms based in Washington, D.C., and New York tell Money the same.
Wu, with the NCLC, continues to recommend people file complaints to the CFPB, even if the agency isn't currently very helpful. It's still an important step to start a public paper trail, and it could prove useful retroactively if a new administration or law compels the CFPB to take the complaints more seriously.
But it's probably not going to be the only step needed to fix a credit error. For people like Halseth, correcting a credit report may now require hiring a lawyer to handle what a free complaint used to.
“A credit score unlocks everything in the world, if you think about it,” she says. “They’re essentially holding the key to life in America.”
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