Last week, the Trump-Vought Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, moved to make it harder for people to seek help with financial problems by filing a complaint with the consumer agency.
Consumers who file a complaint with CFPB now see new warning notices telling them not to submit a credit reporting complaint to it unless a dispute has already been filed with the credit reporting agency.
The notices, which went live on Feb. 4, also require people to agree to onerous and legally dubious statements about their eligibility to seek help, Ruth Susswein, director of consumer protection at Consumer Action, an advocacy group, said in a statement. The notices aren’t limited to complaints about credit reporting errors, but appear to consumers filing complaints for any financial issue ranging from mortgages to debt collection.
The action was taken without any formal notice just days after the CFPB announced a public input process to collect more information on how the consumer complaint system is working, Susswein said. The changes also appear to follow industry requests made last month to reduce the number of consumer complaints about credit reporting errors submitted to the CFPB.
“Consumers are bound to find these warnings intimidating, given that the CFPB is the federal agency that Americans have come to rely on to get some relief from their unresolved disputes with big financial firms,” she said.
“We encourage consumers to continue to submit complaints about ongoing credit reporting disputes with both the credit bureau and the CFPB,” Susswein said. “It is people’s right to report problems, and the agency’s responsibility to insist on a fair financial marketplace.”
The consumer agency received more than 5.6 million consumer complaints in 2025, doubling the complaint volume of the previous year. Credit reporting complaints accounted for 85 percent of all complaints, with consumers often describing problems with incorrect information. These errors can drive up costs across every part of their financial lives. Companies reported more than 2 million people getting relief from filing a credit reporting consumer complaint in 2025.
“Not only does the complaint system solve problems faced by millions of households across the country, but it also serves as a critical early warning system for state attorneys general and other state financial regulators,” said Adam Rust, director of financial services at the Consumer Federation of America, an advocacy group. “Obstructing consumers from making use of the complaint database undermines essential law enforcement activity.”
Congress created the complaint system and the CFPB with a mandate to ensure that consumers’ financial complaints would be addressed by banks, credit bureaus, debt collectors, mortgage servicers, and other companies that do business with them.
