A District Court judge in New Jersey has dismissed a Fair Credit Reporting Act lawsuit against two credit reporting agencies and a lender after finding the plaintiff never spelled out how the tradelines he complained about were actually inaccurate.
The background: The case grew out of three travel-related loans and a fight over how they were later reported.
- The plaintiff, representing himself, took out three loans through a lender that finances airfare, cruise, and hotel purchases for travelers; the loans were originated by a bank and then sold to the lender, which serviced them.
- In late 2023, the lender sold his accounts to a debt buyer for collection, and he was told to send his payments to that new company.
- He disputed the resulting tradelines and filed a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the debt buyer confirmed it had told the bureaus to delete the tradelines but said it could not act on tradelines belonging to other entities.
- He argued the two agencies kept reporting the accounts anyway, costing him funding, credit-score points, and causing emotional distress, and he brought three FCRA claims covering accuracy procedures, reinvestigation, and furnisher duties.
The ruling: Judge Georgette Castner of the District Court for the District of New Jersey granted the motions to dismiss, holding the complaint never cleared the FCRA’s threshold requirement of an actual, identified inaccuracy.
- Judge Castner explained that the accuracy and reinvestigation claims apply only to the agencies, while the furnisher claim applies only to the lender, and that each one rises or falls on whether the reported information was plausibly alleged to be wrong.
- Labeling the three accounts “inaccurate tradelines” was not enough; the judge found the complaint said nothing about how and why the information was inaccurate.
- The plaintiff’s briefs began to fill that gap, arguing that reporting accounts as charged-off or transferred after a deletion confirmation “materially misleads credit decisionmakers” and pointing to labels like “Potentially Negative” and “Charged off.” But the judge noted a plaintiff cannot amend a complaint through briefing, so those later explanations could not rescue it.
- The judge also observed that the FCRA lets agencies report charged-off accounts for seven years, and that a later settlement does not erase the earlier charge-off, so the labels he objected to were not obviously wrong.
- On the furnisher claim, the judge found he never alleged the missing link: that an agency, not the consumer or the CFPB, had passed his dispute to the lender, which is what triggers a furnisher’s duty to investigate.
