May 21, 2020

CFPB: Consumer Complaint Bulletin Issued for Complaints Received during COVID-19 Pandemic

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Bureau) today issued a report analyzing the complaints received during the COVID-19 pandemic. The bulletin shows that mortgage and credit card complaints top the list of complaints the Bureau has received that mention coronavirus or related terms. In April and May, the Bureau received historically higher complaints, however, complaints mentioning COVID-related terms amounted to a total of 4,500 complaints during those two months.

Mortgage and credit card complaints top the list for complaints that mention coronavirus terms, with 22 percent and 19 percent of complaints, respectively. Among mortgage complaints that mention coronavirus keywords, 59 percent of consumers identified struggling to pay the mortgage as the issue. For credit card complaints, 19 percent of consumers identified a problem with purchase shown or statement as the issue.

The Bureau also received its highest complaint volumes in its history in March and April at 36,700 and 42,500, respectively. In 2019, the monthly average for complaints was 29,000. The bulletin attributes the higher numbers to factors such as market conditions and more public awareness of the complaint system.

Other Complaint Bulletin highlights:

The Complaint Bulletin also includes:

Since 2011, the Bureau has handled more than 2.2 million consumer complaints. More than 5,000 financial companies have responded through this process, providing timely responses to 97 percent of the nearly 1.6 million complaints sent to them for response.

The public can view the complaints in the database at a state-level, filter and sort complaints, and search published complaint narratives for key words of interest. Visit the Consumer Complaint Database.

This post was originally published here.