CFPB: Credit Card Complaints Focus Most Often on Billing, Fraud

Billing disputes account for 17 percent of consumer complaints about credit cards, with identity theft and fraud concerns accounting for an additional 10 percent, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s periodic summary of consumer complaints today. Other credit card complaint topics include account closures (7 percent), interest rate disputes (6 percent) and late fees (4 percent).

Although the bureau spotlighted complaints about credit cards in its report, complaints account for a negligible fraction of all open card accounts. According to the latest quarterly data in 2016 released by the American Bankers Association, there are 346 million open credit card accounts in the U.S.

The CFPB received a little over 21,000 credit card complaints in 2016, resulting a 0.006 percent complaint rate. Of these complaints, two-thirds were closed with an explanation from the company, and 98 percent of responses from companies were timely.