CFPB: Prepaid Complaints Down in December (Feb. 1, 2016)
Prepaid cards continued to comprise just a tiny percentage of the consumer complaints received by the CFPB, according to the agency’s latest monthly complaint “snapshot” report. During the month of December 2015, the CFPB received a total of 230 prepaid-related complaints, down 11 percent from the 257 complaints it received in November. By product type, prepaid was the subject of the third-fewest complaints, trailing only money transfer (194 complaints) and “other financial services”—a category including check cashing, credit repair and debt settlement, among others—with 162 complaints.
Overall, prepaid complaints comprised slightly more than 1 percent of the 20,388 total complaints received by the CFPB in December. Though the three-month average for prepaid complaints in the period from Oct. 1 to Dec. 31 remained up significantly—233 percent—from a year earlier, the vast majority of that increase likely can be attributed to a temporary service disruption of one prepaid provider and the CFPB’s solicitation of related complaints via social media.
For the second straight month, debt collection and mortgages remained the two most-complained about topics in December, with 6,410 and 3,839 complaints, respectively—or more than half of all consumer complaints to the agency. Credit reporting ranked third, with 3,513 complaints, while bank accounts and services were the subject of 2,006 complaints, the bureau said.
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