The Federal Complaint Portal That Cuts Checks Is Still Open. File Yours This Week.

If a bank, credit card issuer, or mortgage servicer stiffed you in the last four years and you never filed a complaint, do it this week. The federal tool that has put $17.5 billion back in Americans’ pockets since 2011 is still open. The reports around it are not.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau spent May 2026 deleting 15 years of blog posts, press releases, and every Supervisory Highlights report since 2012 from its website. That’s the paper trail that named which banks were caught doing what. Gone. In a June 24 announcement, the Bureau said it “no longer has the resources to maintain the Consumer Complaint Database as it exists today,” and rolled out portal changes it framed as reforms.

The Submit a Complaint portal at consumerfinance.gov/complaint is still up. When you file, the CFPB still routes your complaint to the company’s regulatory affairs team. The company still has 15 days to respond. That mechanism is the one that gets checks cut, escrow rebalanced, late fees reversed, and a mistaken repossession undone. It has not been shut off.

The CFPB blamed volume for the retrenchment. Complaints jumped from 150,000 in 2019 to more than 5 million in 2025, with most of that flood from credit repair firms and social media accounts filing template disputes at scale. Fair enough. That doesn’t help you if you’re the person with a real dispute over an unauthorized charge or an escrow error the servicer keeps “reviewing.”

Here’s what they don’t tell you. Companies hate CFPB complaints. Every one shows up in the bank’s supervisory file, gets counted in their regulator scorecard, and puts a real name and case number on a customer service problem that a branch would otherwise ignore. It is the one lever a normal person has that makes a large bank read the email personally. Since it opened, the Bureau has put $17.5 billion back in Americans’ pockets, per its own twelve-year retrospective, through enforcement and complaint work the database and its reports supported.

Real money. Do this week.

Gather paperwork before you open the form. You need the account number, the dates, the amount in dispute, copies of any letters or emails you already sent, and the company’s response (or their silence). Then file at consumerfinance.gov/complaint. Pick the product category (mortgage, credit card, debt collection, checking account, credit report) and describe what happened in plain English. Attach documents.

Give the company 15 days. They almost always respond. If the answer is a form letter that ignores the facts, reply through the CFPB portal, not through the bank’s own channels. Your reply goes back into the file.

If the answer is silence past 15 days, the CFPB flags the case for follow-up. That still works. Don’t wait until it doesn’t.

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