A District Court judge in Pennsylvania has dismissed a consumer’s Fair Credit Reporting Act lawsuit against a credit reporting agency, ruling that nearly 250 pages of attached exhibits could not stand in for a plain explanation of how his credit report was wrong.
The background: The plaintiff, who represented himself, claimed the defendant reported inaccurate and misleading information about him and failed to fix it.
- Earlier this year, the court dismissed his original complaint for failing to state a claim and gave him a chance to file an amended version that cured the problems it had flagged.
- His amended complaint ran short on allegations but long on paper, arriving with roughly 250 pages of exhibits. The full filing topped 330 pages, in part because he submitted a duplicate copy of the complaint and several of the exhibits.
- He alleged the defendant deleted accounts and then reinserted them without proper notice, leaned on automated verification, and kept reporting bad data after he raised concerns.
- He disputed the information through multiple disputes and complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
- He also pointed to enforcement actions that federal regulators announced in early 2025, arguing they reinforced the pattern of conduct he described.
The ruling: Judge Michael M. Baylson of the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania dismissed the amended complaint, this time with prejudice.
- Judge Baylson found the plaintiff again listed failures as conclusory sentence fragments without ever explaining how or why any specific item was inaccurate, such as that a balance was not really owed, a payment was not really late, or an account was not really his.
- The exhibits did not save the claims. The judge wrote that a complaint cannot rest on attachments alone, and that he would not comb a stack of documents in search of the basis for a lawsuit. “Judges are not like pigs, hunting for truffles buried in the record,” he wrote, quoting Third Circuit precedent.
- The filing’s own loose ends did not help. It cited “Exhibits E and F” that were never attached, and a handwritten note promised that inaccurate information “will be highlighted” without explaining what made the highlighted material wrong.
- Because the plaintiff had already been told what his pleading needed and had been given a chance to fix it, the judge ruled that another amendment would be pointless and closed the case for good.
