How to Report a Collection Agency: CFPB, FTC, and State AG

To report a collection agency, file a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at consumerfinance.gov/complaint and a report with the Federal Trade Commission at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. Add a complaint to your state attorney general’s consumer protection division, and if you want compensation rather than just enforcement, you can sue the collector directly under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act for up to $1,000 in statutory damages plus attorney fees. Neither federal agency acts as your personal lawyer or resolves your individual dispute, but their complaint data drives enforcement against collectors who break the law.

What Actually Counts as a Reportable Violation

A complaint carries weight when you can point to specific conduct the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act prohibits, not just a general sense that a collector was rude. The most commonly reported violations:

Calling before 8:00 a.m. or after 9:00 p.m. in your local time, without your permission or a court order.¹
Harassment, profanity, threats of violence, or repeated calls meant to annoy.²
Misrepresenting the amount owed, falsely claiming you’ll be arrested, or implying wage garnishment when that action isn’t both legal and intended.³
Threatening to sue when the collector has no intention of filing.³
Failing to send a validation notice within five days of first contact, showing the amount owed, the creditor’s name, and your right to dispute within 30 days.⁴
Continuing to contact you after you’ve sent a written cease-and-desist letter.¹

If any of that describes what happened to you, you have enough to file. You don’t need a lawyer to tell you so first.

Build Your Evidence Before You File

The strength of a complaint tracks directly with what you can prove. Start a chronological log: date and time of each call, the name and any employee ID of the person you spoke with, and a close-to-verbatim summary of what was said. Timestamps matter especially for calls outside the 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. window, since your phone’s call history corroborates the log.

Save every letter, validation notice, and envelope. The postmark date on an envelope can prove the collector missed the five-day validation deadline.⁴ Screenshot emails and texts with timestamps visible. Back up voicemails to a computer or cloud drive; they capture the collector’s own words with no dispute about what was said.

Recording Phone Calls

Federal law lets you record a call you’re part of without the other person’s consent.⁵ Most states follow that same one-party rule, but a smaller group requires every person on the call to consent. Check your state’s recording statute before you hit record. A safe habit is to announce at the start that you’re recording; if the collector stays on the line, that’s generally treated as implied consent, and most collectors are already recording their end anyway.

Filing With the CFPB

Go to consumerfinance.gov/complaint and choose “Debt collection” from the product list.⁶ The portal walks you through describing what happened, identifying the collection company, and uploading your documents.

Be thorough in the narrative. Include the collector’s name, the account number, the original creditor, and each specific violation. You generally can’t submit a second complaint about the same problem, so treat the narrative as your one chance to lay it out.⁶

The CFPB forwards your complaint directly to the company, which generally responds within 15 days. In complex cases, the company can flag the response as in progress and take up to 60 days.⁷ You’ll get email updates and can log in to check status. If the response doesn’t satisfy you, you have 60 days to provide feedback through the portal.

One caveat on the CFPB itself: in late 2025, the agency’s leadership declared its traditional funding mechanism illegal and indicated it could exhaust available funds in early 2026. As of early 2026, the complaint portal still appeared to be accepting submissions, but the agency’s long-term capacity to process complaints and pursue enforcement is uncertain. If the portal isn’t functional when you try, go straight to the FTC and your state attorney general.

Filing With the FTC

The FTC accepts debt collection reports at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.⁸ Click “Report Now” and answer a series of questions about the company, what happened, and whether you lost money. When you finish, you’ll get a report number and suggested next steps.

The FTC does not resolve individual disputes. Every report feeds the Consumer Sentinel Network, a law enforcement database used by investigators across thousands of agencies to identify repeat offenders and build cases.⁹ Filing with both the CFPB and the FTC isn’t redundant; the two agencies serve different functions and keep separate databases.

Filing With Your State Attorney General

Nearly every state attorney general’s office runs a consumer protection division that handles complaints against debt collectors operating in the state. These offices can investigate, mediate, and enforce state consumer protection laws that often reach further than federal law.

The National Association of Attorneys General maintains a directory at naag.org that links to each state’s complaint resources.¹⁰ Many states use online forms; some still take mailed complaints. If the collector operates from a different state than the one you live in, filing in both can make sense. State investigators sometimes have tools federal agencies don’t, including the power to revoke a collector’s state license.

Sending a Cease-and-Desist Letter

You can tell a debt collector to stop contacting you entirely. Once a collector receives a written notice that you refuse to pay or that you want communication to stop, the FDCPA requires them to comply.¹ It has to be in writing. A phone call doesn’t trigger the obligation.

After receiving your letter, the collector can only contact you to confirm they’re ending collection efforts, to notify you that they or the creditor may pursue a specific legal remedy, or to inform you they intend to pursue one.¹ Any other contact after the letter is itself a violation you can report and potentially sue over.

Send the letter by certified mail with return receipt. Keep a copy of the letter and the signed receipt with your evidence. A cease-and-desist letter does not erase the debt. The collector can still report it to credit bureaus and can still sue you. What stops is the calls and demand letters.

If the Debt Is From Identity Theft

If a collector is chasing you for a debt someone else opened in your name, the process is different. Start at IdentityTheft.gov, the FTC’s dedicated portal, which generates an official Identity Theft Report you’ll use throughout recovery.¹¹

Write to the collector within 30 days of receiving the collection letter, tell them the debt is the result of identity theft, and include a copy of your Identity Theft Report. Contact the original creditor and ask them to stop reporting the debt. Ask the credit bureaus to block the fraudulent information; with an FTC Identity Theft Report, the bureaus must honor the block, which means companies cannot keep trying to collect it from you.¹¹ Keep a written record of every person you contact and every letter you send.

Suing the Collector Under the FDCPA

Federal complaints drive long-term enforcement, but they won’t put money in your pocket. If you want compensation, you sue. The FDCPA gives you a private right of action in federal district court or any state court with jurisdiction, and the fee structure is friendlier to consumers than most people realize.

You can recover three categories of damages:

Actual damages for real financial harm you can prove, such as lost wages, medical costs from stress, or fees you paid because of the misconduct. There is no cap.
Statutory damages up to $1,000 per lawsuit, awarded at the court’s discretion even if you can’t prove actual financial harm.¹²
Reasonable attorney fees and costs if you win. This is the provision that makes these cases viable. Most consumer attorneys take FDCPA cases on contingency because the fee-shifting means the collector pays the legal bill, not you.¹²

The critical deadline: you must file within one year of the date the violation occurred.¹² That clock runs whether or not you’ve filed a CFPB complaint. Months spent going back and forth with federal agencies do not pause the one-year window. If you’re thinking about a lawsuit, talk to a consumer rights attorney early, even while your complaints are pending.

A collector can defend by showing the violation was an unintentional, good-faith error despite having procedures in place to avoid mistakes.¹² That defense is hard to win against a record of repeated or egregious conduct, which is why your detailed log and saved correspondence matter so much.

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1692c – Communication in Connection With Debt Collection
2
GovInfo. 15 USC 1692d – Harassment or Abuse
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1692e – False or Misleading Representations
4
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1692g – Validation of Debts
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 2511 – Interception and Disclosure of Wire, Oral, or Electronic Communications
6
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Submit a Complaint
7
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Learn How the Complaint Process Works
8
Federal Trade Commission. ReportFraud.ftc.gov
9
Federal Trade Commission. Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024
10
National Association of Attorneys General. Consumer File a Complaint
11
Federal Trade Commission. IdentityTheft.gov Recovery Steps
12
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1692k – Civil Liability