If a payday, installment, or subprime auto lender turned you down and your regular credit reports look fine, the file behind the denial may belong to FactorTrust — an alternative-credit bureau most borrowers have never heard of. FactorTrust’s file is a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and when it is wrong you have the same federal rights you would have against Equifax, Experian, or TransUnion — which, as it happens, owns it.
What FactorTrust is
The CFPB’s consumer reporting company list places FactorTrust in its low-income and subprime category: it collects loan performance information on nonprime consumers and supplies predictive credit data and risk scores to short-term lenders, installment lenders, nonprime auto lenders and leasing companies, and other subprime credit providers. FactorTrust is owned by TransUnion, and TransUnion’s own support pages handle its consumer inquiries. If you have used payday or small-dollar installment credit, there is likely a FactorTrust file on you — separate from your regular credit reports, and invisible until a lender acts on it.
Where these files go wrong
Alternative-credit data fails the same ways the mainstream kind does. A loan you repaid still reporting as open or delinquent. A lender’s data feed applying someone else’s payments — or someone else’s defaults — to your file, the same matching failure that produces a mixed credit file. An identity thief’s payday loans on your record. FactorTrust sits in the same family as Clarity Services, Teletrack, and DataX — the subprime credit bureaus whose files decide small-dollar lending — and an error at any of them follows you from application to application.
Your rights: the file is free, and the dispute is federal law
Per the CFPB’s listing, FactorTrust will provide one free report every twelve months on request — by phone at (844) 773-3321 or by mail at FactorTrust, Inc., Attn: Consumer Inquiries, P.O. Box 390, Woodlyn, PA 19094 — delivered within fifteen days, and it will freeze the file on request. Read every tradeline. If anything is inaccurate or incomplete, dispute it in writing with proof — payoff confirmations, bank statements, an identity theft report — and the FCRA requires a reasonable investigation, free of charge, with correction of whatever cannot be verified.
When it becomes a legal claim
If loan denials or worse terms trace to file information that was not yours or not accurate, and a proper dispute did not fix it, the FCRA provides actual damages, statutory and punitive damages for willful violations, and attorney’s fees — which is why we handle these cases on contingency. A bureau serving subprime lenders is still a consumer reporting agency, and the borrowers it reports on have exactly the same rights as everyone else.
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Richard Kim is rated 10.0 out of 10 on Avvo, with 35 client reviews averaging 5.0 out of 5 stars (as of August 2026) — read the reviews on Avvo. Admitted in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; available to appear pro hac vice in other federal courts. You pay nothing unless we win.
Published by The Kim Law Firm, LLC — about attorney Richard Kim. Last updated August 2026.