Consumer complaints rise against companies after CFPB drops enforcement cases

Of 23 firms the agency sued, 17 drew more complaints afterward

Consumer complaints against major financial companies rose in the year after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dropped enforcement lawsuits against them, according to an investigation published Thursday by The Guardian with the non-profit Economic Hardship Reporting Project. The analysis of the bureau’s own complaint database lands amid a broad rollback of the agency’s enforcement work under President Donald Trump, whose administration began abandoning the suits — against defendants including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and companies in Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway empire — early in his second term.

Across all banks and corporations named as defendants in the now-dropped cases, complaints published to the CFPB’s public database rose by more than 75%, the analysis found. Seventeen of the 23 financial firms named as defendants saw complaint counts increase. Complaints against Rocket Mortgage rose more than 130%, from 510 to 1,182, in the year after the bureau dropped a kickback lawsuit against its sibling company, Rocket Homes; complaints against Branch Messenger Inc, which had been accused of working with Walmart to harvest more than $10 million in unfair banking fees from the chain’s delivery drivers, rose 315%, from 46 to 191. The increases fit a larger surge: publicly posted complaints to the agency have grown from nearly 2.7 million in 2024 to 6.3 million so far this year.

Experts, along with current and former CFPB employees, said the spike in complaints against companies freed from enforcement actions points to a disconnect between the bureau’s mission and its actions. “Consumers are telling the bureau that there is an emergency, and the bureau is not listening or acting on that information,” said Erie Meyer, a former chief technologist at the CFPB who helped oversee the creation of its complaint database. “People are getting screwed twice: first by the company, second by the agency that’s supposed to stick up for them.”

The retreat is measurable on the enforcement side as well. Between mid-2012 and early 2025, the bureau publicly launched nearly 400 enforcement actions against banks and other financial firms — an average of roughly 30 a year, according to its website — actions the agency has said helped win aggrieved consumers more than $21 billion in restitution and cancelled debts. Since Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, the CFPB has launched just two public enforcement actions, its website indicates: one announced several days later and another brought in August 2025.

The bureau’s current leadership did not reply to a detailed list of questions for the story. An agency spokesperson said in a statement that the CFPB had cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars, “making the American Dream, like homeownership, more costly by the thousands for each borrower,” and described it as a “Weaponized agency” that “attacked political enemies and disfavored industries and used novel legal theories and secret justifications to ruin lives and businesses.” “We are fixing that and bringing the agency back to operating within statute,” the statement said. In a report published in March, the CFPB said many of the dismissed enforcement actions “constituted agency overreach” and “should never have been undertaken.” The White House did not reply to questions.

The Guardian’s reporting illustrated what some of the dropped cases left behind. When Amanda and Jason Riffle got married in 2024, they struggled to find a place for their blended family of five. Rents around Clarksburg, West Virginia, were too high for the amount of space they needed, Amanda Riffle said. After Jason’s family gave them a plot of land as a wedding gift, the couple bought a four-bedroom, 2.5-bath manufactured home that was sold and financed by two Berkshire Hathaway companies, Clayton Homes and Vanderbilt Mortgage & Finance. In a lawsuit, later moved from state to federal court, the couple alleged the companies used “bait-and-switch” tactics that raised their costs beyond what they had been promised: a price of just over $250,000 with installation included rose to more than $290,000 shortly before closing, according to the complaint, which put the model’s market value between $180,000 and $200,000. The case was settled on confidential terms. “They show you one number, and then it changes,” Amanda Riffle said in an interview. “They really did rush us through everything: ‘You just need to sign here, you need to sign here.’ They did not go over those things in detail.”

The Riffles filed suit just over three months after the CFPB walked away from its own lawsuit against Vanderbilt, which alleged the lender had made large numbers of loans on manufactured homes “without making a reasonable and good-faith determination that the borrowers could repay them.” Two private lawsuits filed around the same time in federal court in West Virginia by Mountain State Justice, the legal aid group that handled the Riffles’ case, alleged Vanderbilt failed to realistically evaluate loan affordability for financially unsophisticated borrowers. One, also settled confidentially, alleged that the closing agent overseeing a plaintiff’s loan signing was a former longtime Clayton Homes salesman who falsely claimed to be the mayor of a small West Virginia town, using an email address that included the moniker “THE MAYOR41.” The other, set for trial in December, claims one borrower was “handicapped and reads at only a kindergarten level.”

CFPB data reviewed by The Guardian show complaints against Vanderbilt rose 39% in the year after the agency dropped its case, from 84 to 117. In a statement, Vanderbilt said it originates more than 20,000 loans and services more than 165,000 each year, that the number of CFPB complaints it receives is “extremely low,” and that “a change of 33 complaints over 12 months is extraordinarily small.” The company said none of the complaints in that period led the CFPB to ask it to change its lending practices, that its practices “exceed the legal requirements for assessing a borrower’s ability to repay a loan,” and that it weighs both debt-to-income ratios and residual income even though the law requires only one or the other. In court records in West Virginia, Vanderbilt said it follows federal truth-in-lending rules and made no misrepresentations to borrowers; in the case set for trial, it said it “repeatedly and accurately disclosed the terms of the loan.”

The bureau dropped its lawsuit against Rocket Homes a month into Trump’s second term. Filed in federal court in Michigan, the case alleged that Rocket Homes pressed real estate agents to steer buyers toward Rocket Mortgage loans as part of a kickback scheme that discouraged home shoppers from looking for the best deal, and that the lender charged higher rates and fees to borrowers who arrived through the referrals. A year after the withdrawal, an older borrower in Washington state complained to the agency that a banker had promised cash back for refinancing, only to be told weeks after closing that the money had been “absorbed by closing costs.” The borrower wrote that the family had been “manipulated by deceptive information designed to entice us into spending thousands of dollars to refinance with Rocket Mortgage.”

Rocket said the agency’s claims “were baseless and the CFPB knew it,” that Rocket Homes focuses on connecting buyers “with top-performing agents based on objective criteria,” and that any increase in complaints “came as an obvious result of the increased size of the business.” “This year, a minuscule 0.040% of clients working with Rocket have filed a complaint,” the company said.

Three months after dropping the Rocket case, the bureau backed off a lawsuit alleging Walmart had forced its delivery drivers to use deposit accounts arranged through Branch Messenger, which administers a workforce payments and digital banking platform. The CFPB claimed the gig workers struggled to access their earnings and were forced to pay $10 million in “junk fees” to move their money to other accounts. Dozens of Uber drivers filed complaints describing lockouts from Uber Pro Card accounts set up through the firm, where their earnings had been deposited. “I worked to earn that money,” one driver wrote three months after the dismissal. “Branch has the money. I can not access my earnings and they seem content to keep the money and let me starve.” Walmart, Branch and Uber did not respond to questions.

The agency also dropped a lawsuit accusing three of the nation’s largest banks — JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — and Zelle’s operator, Early Warning Services, of failing to protect consumers from widespread fraud on the digital payment service, which the three banks partly own. The bureau said that failure led to more than $870 million in customer losses. In the year after the case was abandoned, complaints involving JPMorgan rose 19%, Wells Fargo 26% and Bank of America nearly 33%. The three banks declined to comment. An Early Warning spokesperson called the suit “meritless” and said it “sought to shift blame to Zelle for criminals’ actions,” adding that it “wrongly portrayed Zelle fraud countermeasures as ineffective, even though more than 99.98% of Zelle transactions are without report of fraud or scam.”

The pullback extends beyond the dismissed dockets. Alongside dropping cases against more than 20 companies, the bureau has deprioritized scrutiny of digital payments, student loans and medical debt, and announced it would no longer focus on enforcing truth-in-lending rules for “buy now, pay later” loans — an expanding corner of the credit market whose installment plans consumers use for clothing, smartphones, groceries, rent and car repairs. The agency says it aims to focus on “tangible harms” and “pressing threats to consumers” — “particularly service members and their families, and veterans.” The National Consumer Law Center has reported that BNPL loans can sometimes be a reasonable alternative to paying up front or using a credit card, but often carry late charges and fees that turn “what looks like free financing” into “a high cost loan.”

Published complaints about some of the industry’s largest players climbed after the withdrawal: Klarna’s rose 382%, from 290 to 1,398. Complaints by current and former service members and veterans grew at generally higher rates than those of other consumers, rising 465% against Klarna and 135%, from 64 to 151, against Rocket Mortgage, according to The Guardian’s review of agency data. Klarna did not respond to questions; industry leaders say BNPL providers maintain strong safeguards, and some factor borrowers’ repayment histories into lending decisions. Jennifer Zhang, a policy, research and data analyst at the non-profit Protect Borrowers, said the BNPL pullback signals that even when consumers sound the alarm about abusive practices, “the CFPB is not listening.”

In early 2023, the Biden-era CFPB teamed with New York Attorney General Letitia James in a lawsuit alleging that Credit Acceptance Corporation, a top subprime auto lender, had hit car buyers with hidden costs and high-interest loans they could not afford. The bureau withdrew from the suit after Trump took office. Complaints against the company rose 34%, from 2,722 to 3,652, in the year after the withdrawal, describing many of the issues the case had targeted; in July, a Pennsylvania customer wrote of an inflated sales price built from fees and financed add-ons: “I believe this is the exact type of lending practice that consumer protection laws are intended to prevent.” In September, James announced a $700 million settlement with Credit Acceptance covering New York, 39 other states and Washington DC. The company did not answer questions, but said in a statement on its website that the settlement was reached “without any admission of fault or wrongdoing” and that the required changes “do not fundamentally alter the company’s business model.”

The CFPB did not answer questions about the case; it has previously said it wants to leave many enforcement and supervision priorities to state agencies. Consumer law experts told The Guardian that states often lack the resources or reach to mount a truly national challenge to questionable practices at the nation’s most powerful companies.

The CFPB was created in 2011, after predatory loans fueled by Wall Street money helped ignite a meltdown that destroyed hundreds of banks and produced millions of job losses and foreclosures; the US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission laid much of the blame on a jumble of federal agencies that did little to stop such practices. “It became clear that the nation needed a financial regulator solely focused on looking out for consumers,” the bureau has said. Project 2025, the conservative roadmap for Trump’s second term, called for the agency’s destruction, describing it as a “highly politicized, damaging and utterly unaccountable federal agency.”

Trump said he knew nothing about Project 2025, but soon after returning to office he appointed one of its key architects, Russell Vought, as the bureau’s acting director and fired Rohit Chopra, the Biden-era director known as an advocate for aggressive enforcement. Trump told reporters the agency “was a very important thing to get rid of,” saying he had received calls from “lending officers” and “owners of small banks” who were “almost crying” because the agency had put them “out of business”; the White House did not respond to a request to describe the circumstances of those calls. Under Vought, the agency tried at one point to lay off nearly 90% of its workforce and to slash its own funding before federal court rulings blocked both moves. Vought, who is also Trump’s budget director, did not reply to questions about his time running the agency.

The rollback has also reached cases that were already resolved, according to the reporting. Austin Hinkle, a former senior counsel and section chief at the CFPB, said Congress should investigate both the “corporate pardons” received by companies sued by the agency and the administration’s push to cut or erase financial penalties in completed enforcement actions. In one 2025 case, CFPB officials went back to court to ask a judge to let them refund a $105,000 penalty paid by an Illinois mortgage company accused of racial discrimination; the judge denied the request. In another, officials renegotiated a January 2025 agreement — the bureau’s last major enforcement action before Trump appointees took over — under which the money services business Wise US Inc, without admitting or denying the findings, agreed to pay roughly $450,000 in consumer refunds and a $2.025 million fine over allegations it misled US customers about its ATM fees and failed to properly disclose other fees. Four months later, the agency said it had restructured the deal: the fine fell to $44,955, and the updated consent order carried a new signature — Vought’s, replacing Chopra’s, whom Trump had fired the day after the original order was signed.

The agency has also made it harder for the public to see what consumers are saying about financial firms. In August it announced it would no longer publish consumer complaint narratives, which it said “present only one side of an issue,” and soon after removed millions of them from its online database. Users must now download enormous complaint files from the CFPB’s website and sort them manually. Meyer called the change “an unconscionable waste of time and effort and money.” “We built this complaint system so we would never again get to a place where people would be flying blind about what’s happening to people who are white-knuckling their spot in the middle class,” she said. The database, she said, is “the only place where you see a granular-level description of what’s actually happening to people,” and was designed to be “public by default” because “we don’t want to wait until it’s front page news — or financial institutions snapping the economy in half — before we catch these problems.”

The Guardian’s reporting arrived amid midterm elections fought in large part over the prices Americans pay for gas, food and shelter; last week’s results delivered big wins for Democrats who faulted Trump’s policies for the rising cost of living. Some Democrats now plan to push to reverse the enforcement rollback and re-establish the bureau as a national leader in fighting unfair financial practices. In written statements, Representative Bill Foster of Illinois and Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada said they plan to aggressively scrutinize what has happened at the CFPB since Trump returned to office. “Next Congress, my colleagues on the Financial Services Committee and I will investigate the unconstitutional dismantling of the CFPB,” Foster said, adding that committee members will pursue “subpoenas, investigations, hearings, and, ultimately, legislative action to restore consumer protections in this country and hold accountable those who seek to profit off the most vulnerable Americans.”

The Senate will also decide whether to confirm Trump’s pick to replace Vought, who left his position as the CFPB’s acting director in August. Johnson, Trump’s nominee to lead the bureau, served as its deputy director during the first Trump administration and more recently worked as a vice-president overseeing credit card compliance at Capital One — among the companies whose CFPB lawsuits the agency dropped. The Capital One case, which accused the company of misleading some customers about interest rates on savings accounts, was withdrawn a month after Trump’s inauguration; complaints about Capital One rose 9%, from 27,193 to 29,646, in the year after. Capital One did not reply to questions. Johnson has agreed to recuse himself from any CFPB action related to Capital One for two years if he is confirmed.