On February 29th, 2024, a consumer from Texas posted a complaint on the CFPB portal against Experian that read like the start of a novel
“In the quiet humdrum of everyday life, a sudden jolt shattered the tranquility. I had become a victim of identity theft. Like a thief in the night, unseen hands had stolen my personal information, plunging me into a bewildering maze of uncertainty”
Over the next 309 days, 5,097 other consumers from 32 different states used the exact same dramatic narrative to file their complaints against all the major bureaus.
Could this be a coincidence? Nope.
In fact, it’s part of an escalating trend where consumers or credit repair companies are pummeling the CFPB with cookie-cutter narratives to erase their bad debt.
Credit Washing Is Running Amok on CFPB Portal
Credit washers have polluted the CFPB complaint database, perhaps beyond repair, with cut-and-paste bogus filings.
In fact, 43% of the consumer complaint narratives the CFPB has ever published are cookie-cutter copycats that came from templates consumers purchased or downloaded from the internet.
I discovered this only after using Claude Fable to analyze more than 17.1 million complaints, including over 3.8 million published narratives, that consumers submitted to the CFPB portal between March 2015 and July 2026.
Analysis of the text in those narratives revealed that 1.7 million of those complaints are exact copies of at least one other complaint.
In most cases, however, each narrative is linked to thousands of identical complaints.
And the problem is only getting worse fast as credit sweep scams sweep across social media.
In 2025, 59.3% of the narratives the bureau published matched another complaint word for word, which is up from 3.2% in 2015.
In 2015, the CFPB received 1,732 cookie-cutter complaints. By 2025, that number has soared to over 724,000 cookie-cutter complaints – a growth of over 41,700%!
How I Used Claude Fable To Find The Cookie Cutter Scheme
Last week, the CFPB published a report stating that it would cease publishing complaint narratives, citing them as providing only the consumer’s side of the story.
Since they are going away, I wanted to make sure I downloaded a copy, which I did. I downloaded the CFPB’s full public export, 17,119,590 complaints received through July 27, 2026, and uploaded it to Claude Fable. I tasked it to identify how often consumers or credit repair companies were cutting and pasting duplicate narratives.
Claude narrowed the 17 million complaints down to 3.8 million that contained narratives, normalized the narratives by removing extra spaces, and lowercased the text to make it consistent. It left spelling and grammar alone, so complaints would only match when two people used the same words.
Claude informed me that it hashed every narrative to find exact matching narratives. To find similar narratives, it used a method called minhash to extract 738,823 candidate pairs and checked each pair for 82 percent similarity or greater.
It identified that 2 million of the 3.8 million long narratives were extremely similar, while 1.7 million were exact duplicates.
The Complaint Flood I Have Been Tracking For 2 Years
If you follow my blog, you will know I have been tracking the CFPB complaints after they spiked suddenly in 2023.
In February, I reported that credit dispute complaints to the CFPB had soared from about 80,000 a month in 2023 to a record 520,000 a month by January 2026.
It’s exactly this spike that led me to investigate these narratives. I wanted to know if credit repair was behind it.
No surprise, it appears that it has been.
The TikTok Narrative Linked To 93,000 Complaints
The cookie-cutter narratives are concentrated in a small number of templates.
But the single most-used template is a privacy notice that cites “15 USC 1681,” which has appeared 93,287 times since April 2022. The narrative is interesting because 30,110 of those narratives also contain a single grammatical error that was cut and pasted into every complaint.
That template appeared in thousands of viral TikTok videos and was sold in credit sweep packages on Gumroad and Etsy for $5 to $15.
This is that narrative.
Another viral TikTok trend involved using the 4-day FCRA identity-theft block language. This narrative became quite popular in 2023 and likely helped account for the massive spike in CFPB complaints.
204 Templates Account For 1 In 4 Complaints
The TikTok examples are not the only ones that appear thousands of times. Just 204 templates have been filed 1,000 or more times, accounting for 886,847 complaints, which is about 1 in 4 narratives the bureau has ever published.
These are the top narratives that appeared in the complaints, along with their counts and dates.
The Template Approach Is Used Because It Works
Credit washers use templates because they work. They push the right buttons with the credit bureaus, cite language that their compliance departments hone in on, and result in tradelines being deleted or blocked more often.
In fact, templates result in 45.8% of complaints closed with non-monetary relief versus 20.6% for the general population.
Template Use Is Also Highly Concentrated Geographically
Credit Washing also tends to be concentrated in certain areas of the country where credit repair sweepers operate, and not surprisingly, templates are highly concentrated in certain ZIP codes.
I looked at the national rate of template use by ZIP code to find the number of complaints submitted per 100 residents. The average was .43
ZIP codes from Texas, Florida, and Georgia were more than 10 times that average with Fort Worth Texas topping the list by a large margin.
CFPB Is Taking Action
The CFPB built its database to capture how often consumers are harmed. But credit washers turned it into a portal for erasing their debts.
But the CFPB appears well aware that the portal is being abused. They recently announced that they are requiring a much more rigorous authentication process to file complaints, as well as requiring consumers to certify that they are the ones filing the complaints, not a third party.
Are those new processes working? Only time will tell.
Download The Full Cooke Cutter Template Inventory
If you’d like to download and view the full template directory that Claude identified, I am providing the full spreadsheet here.
