Santander Consumer USA Credit Report Errors and Re-Aged Auto Loans

Of every auto lender in the United States, this one has the most specific credit reporting record — and it is not close. On December 22, 2020 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau entered a consent order against Santander Consumer USA Inc. that was, unlike most auto enforcement, a Fair Credit Reporting Act furnishing case. The findings are extraordinary in scale. Over 23 million instances in which the Date of First Delinquency was set equal to the Date of Account Information — 35 percent of every delinquency date the company furnished. At least 890,700 instances of contradictory delinquency status. Roughly 367,070 of inconsistent open and closed status. Roughly 250,000 of conflicting balances. That first number is the important one, because setting the delinquency date equal to the current reporting date restarts the seven-year clock on adverse information. That is re-aging, and it is the most damaging single furnishing error there is. This page shows you how to check your own file for it. We act for consumers only, nationwide.

Who Santander Consumer USA is, and how Chrysler Capital fits

Two naming points to settle before anything else, because both send consumers to the wrong page.

Santander Consumer USA Inc. is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. It is a large subprime and near-prime vehicle lender, structurally separate from the retail bank branches that carry the Santander name in the northeastern United States. A consumer with a Santander checking account and a Santander auto loan is dealing with two different operations. On January 31, 2022, Santander Holdings USA, Inc. completed its acquisition of Santander Consumer USA Holdings Inc., making the consumer finance business a wholly owned subsidiary.

Chrysler Capital is a Santander brand. If your vehicle is a Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram or Fiat and your tradeline reads Chrysler Capital, the servicing and furnishing sit with the same operation described on this page. We maintain a separate Chrysler Capital credit report page covering the brand-specific issues; the enforcement history and the delinquency-date analysis below apply to both.

Reporting cadence matters for diagnosing an error, and the company describes its own practice clearly: it reports credit information to all three major credit bureau agencies at the end of each month, including loan or lease amount, account balance, scheduled monthly payment, payment history and account status, and it notes that it can take up to 30 days for the reporting agencies to update a credit report.

That is worth taking seriously before you file anything. A payoff on the fifth of a month may not surface until the following cycle. A report that has not caught up yet is not the same thing as a report that is wrong, and disputing the first wastes the effort you should be spending on the second.

The December 2020 CFPB order: an actual credit reporting case

Most auto enforcement concerns lending or servicing. This one concerned furnishing, which is why it is the anchor of this page.

Docket 2020-BCFP-0027, entered December 22, 2020, with a $4,750,000 civil money penalty and a relevant period running from January 2016 through August 2019.

The Bureau found violations of FCRA section 623(a)(1)(A), furnishing information the company knew or had reasonable cause to believe was inaccurate; section 623(a)(2), failing to promptly update and correct; section 623(a)(5)(A), failing to provide the Date of First Delinquency on charged-off and collection accounts; and Regulation V, 12 C.F.R. 1022.42(a), failing to establish and implement reasonable written policies and procedures regarding the accuracy and integrity of information relating to consumers.

The remediation required is as instructive as the findings. The company was required to correct all identified inaccuracies, to conduct monthly accuracy reviews, and to establish reasonable accuracy and integrity policies and procedures. A regulator does not order monthly reviews where quarterly would do unless the underlying failure was systemic.

The next two sections take the findings apart into fields you can check.

Re-aging: what 23 million wrong delinquency dates actually did

This is the most important section on the page. Read it with your credit report open.

The Date of First Delinquency is the date an account first went past due and never subsequently caught up. It is a single field, it looks unremarkable, and it controls how long the account can damage you. Under 15 U.S.C. 1681c, a charged-off or collection account may generally be reported for seven years from the date of first delinquency — not from the charge-off, not from the sale of the debt, and not from the last update.

The Date of Account Information is something entirely different: the date of the most recent update the furnisher sent. It moves forward every month, by design.

The Bureau found over 23 million instances in which the company set the first of those fields equal to the second — 35 percent of all delinquency dates it furnished. In plain terms, the field that is supposed to be frozen at the moment things first went wrong was instead being set to today, over and over, month after month.

The consequence is that the seven-year clock never runs out. An account that first went delinquent in 2016 and should have aged off in 2023 keeps reporting, because every monthly update tells the bureaus the delinquency just happened. Consumers experience this as a derogatory item that simply will not leave, and they usually conclude, wrongly, that nothing can be done about it.

Here is how to check. Find any charged-off or collection auto tradeline on your report. Locate the Date of First Delinquency. Compare it to your own memory and records of when you first fell behind and did not catch up. Then compare it to the Date of Account Information or last-reported date on the same tradeline. If the two dates are the same, or if the delinquency date is materially later than when you actually stopped paying, the account may be re-aged — and the item may be past the point where it can lawfully be reported at all.

Contradictory status, balances, and the rest of the findings

The remaining quantified findings describe internally inconsistent data, and each maps to something visible on a consumer report.

At least 890,700 instances of contradictory delinquency status information. The account status field says one thing while the payment history grid says another — a tradeline reported as current with thirty-day late marks in recent months, or reported delinquent with a clean grid. Underwriters and scoring models read both, and a contradiction resolves against you.

Approximately 367,070 instances of inconsistent open and closed account status. An account closed in fact but reported open still counts against your obligations. An account reported closed while the balance keeps updating is a different kind of nonsense pointing at the same underlying data problem.

Approximately 250,000 instances of conflicting balance information. Not merely a stale balance, but conflicting values — which is why comparing all three bureau reports side by side is the single highest-yield thing a consumer can do with this furnisher. One account cannot correctly carry two different balances.

At least 9,730 instances of missing Date of First Delinquency on delinquent accounts, and at least 89,400 correction files with omitted purchaser information. The second matters when a loan is sold: a report that does not identify who now holds the account leaves the consumer unable to tell whether one debt is being reported once or twice.

Every one of these is checkable without expertise. Print the same tradeline from all three bureaus and lay them side by side.

The 34-state settlement and its deletion provision

Separate from the Bureau's order, a coalition of state attorneys general reached a settlement worth knowing about.

Announced May 19, 2020, the 34-state settlement was valued at approximately $550 million, with figures up to $780 million cited depending on what relief is counted. The alleged conduct: knowingly placing consumers into loans with a high probability of default; using credit scoring models to identify high-risk borrowers and then exposing them to high loan-to-value ratios, backend fees and payment-to-income ratios; failing to monitor dealer abuse and false income reporting; and deceptive servicing practices around partial payments and loan extensions.

The provision that belongs on a credit reporting page is stated expressly. Under the settlement, in the attorneys general's words, Santander will be required to reach out to credit reporting agencies (for example: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) and request the deletion of any negative reports for Santander consumers who are receiving waivers on their loans or are receiving deficiency relief.

That is an unusually concrete term, and it creates a concrete question for anyone who received a waiver or deficiency relief: did the deletion actually happen on your report? Settlement obligations are performed by operations departments, and operations departments make mistakes at volume. If you received relief and the negative entry is still sitting on your file, that is worth investigating rather than assuming.

Two earlier and later matters, for completeness and without overstating them. A March 29, 2017 Massachusetts settlement of $22 million covering more than 2,000 residents, described as first in the nation, alleging loans funded without a reasonable basis to believe borrowers could afford them — it contained no credit reporting relief. A November 20, 2018 Bureau order, docket 2018-BCFP-0008, of roughly $9.29 million in restitution and a $2.5 million penalty over disclosures on a GAP add-on product and loan extension terms. And on June 3, 2026, the New York Department of Financial Services imposed $675,000 — a $400,000 penalty plus over $275,000 in refunds — over undisclosed $25 extension fees under New York Banking Law section 350, with no credit reporting component. State regulators are now the active enforcers in this space.

Where to send a Santander Consumer USA dispute

The company maintains a dedicated credit bureau dispute address, separate from general correspondence and separate again from payments. Using the right one matters.

• Credit bureau disputes: Santander Consumer USA Credit Bureau Disputes, PO Box 961211, Fort Worth, TX 76161.
• General correspondence: Santander Consumer USA Inc., P.O. Box 961245, Fort Worth, TX 76161-1245.
• Payments: Santander Consumer USA Inc., P.O. Box 660633, Dallas, TX 75266-0633.
• Customer service: 888-222-4227, Monday through Friday 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Central and Saturday 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central. Titles: 800-526-0157.
• The three credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, in writing, certified with return receipt.

The bureau disputes are the ones that carry legal weight. Under 15 U.S.C. 1681s-2(b) a furnisher's duty to investigate arises from notice received from a consumer reporting agency, and the parallel duty to furnish accurately in the first instance, at 15 U.S.C. 1681s-2(a), is not privately enforceable by consumers. A letter to Fort Worth alone does not create a claim.

Where the account is not yours, use the identity theft block under 15 U.S.C. 1681c-2, which requires a bureau to block the information within four business days of receiving proof of identity, an identity theft report and your statement that the information does not relate to any transaction you made.

Writing a re-aging dispute that gets somewhere

A re-aging dispute is unusual in that the argument is arithmetic rather than narrative, which makes it strong if you present it as arithmetic.

Gather first: your retail installment contract; the payment history; bank records establishing when payments stopped; any charge-off notice or collection letter and its date; the post-sale accounting if the vehicle was repossessed and sold; any waiver or deficiency relief documentation from the state settlement; and all three current credit reports.

Then set out the dates in sequence and let them do the work. The account first became delinquent in March 2017 and never became current thereafter. The tradeline reports a Date of First Delinquency of November 2025, which is identical to the Date of Account Information on the same tradeline. Under 15 U.S.C. 1681c the seven-year reporting period ran from March 2017 and expired in March 2024. The item must be deleted.

That is a dispute a reinvestigation has to engage with, because it does not ask anyone to weigh your word against the furnisher's. It points at two fields on the furnisher's own report and shows they cannot both be right. Our credit dispute letter guide sets out the full structure.

Send it to all three bureaus, certified with return receipt, keep everything, and pull all three files again afterward to confirm the correction reached each one — and again a month later, because a monthly furnishing cycle is exactly what reintroduced the wrong date in the first place.

Your rights, your remedies, and the deadline

Under 15 U.S.C. 1681i a consumer reporting agency must reinvestigate free of charge, ordinarily within thirty days and up to forty-five where you supply additional information during the period, must forward the relevant information to the furnisher, and must delete or modify anything it cannot verify. Under 15 U.S.C. 1681e(b) the agency must follow reasonable procedures to assure maximum possible accuracy — which speaks to an agency that keeps publishing an item whose own dates show it expired years ago.

Under 15 U.S.C. 1681s-2(b), once notified, the furnisher must investigate, review what the agency forwarded, report back, and correct or delete inaccurate, incomplete or unverifiable information with every agency it reported to.

15 U.S.C. 1681o allows actual damages plus attorney's fees and costs for negligent violations. 15 U.S.C. 1681n allows statutory damages of $100 to $1,000 per violation, punitive damages, and fees and costs for willful violations, and willfulness includes reckless disregard. An item that should have aged off years ago, still reporting after a dispute that laid out the dates, is the kind of record that supports that argument.

15 U.S.C. 1681p generally requires suit within two years of discovering the violation and no more than five years after it occurred.

How The Kim Law Firm handles Santander Consumer USA problems

We represent consumers across the country and act only for consumers, never for lenders, dealers, collectors or credit bureaus. The Santander Consumer USA and Chrysler Capital matters that become cases here look like this: a Date of First Delinquency equal to the current reporting date, or otherwise later than when the account actually went bad; an adverse item still reporting past seven years from the true first delinquency; a status field that contradicts the payment history grid; an account reported open after the vehicle was sold and the loan closed; conflicting balances across the three bureaus; a negative entry that survived a waiver or deficiency relief that required its deletion; a deficiency that does not credit the auction proceeds; a voluntary surrender reported as a repossession; late marks after a bankruptcy petition date; or a vehicle financed in your name by someone else.

We do not help remove accurate negative information, and we say so at the start. A consent order against a lender does not turn a delinquency you actually had into a claim. If the car loan went unpaid and the tradeline records that correctly and with the correct dates, no lawyer can lawfully erase it. What the order does establish is that this furnisher had documented, quantified date and status failures at enormous scale — which is a strong reason to check your own dates rather than assume they are right.

Where reporting is inaccurate and a properly routed dispute left the error standing, you may be entitled to actual damages, statutory and punitive damages for willful conduct, and attorney's fees and costs. Because the statute shifts fees when a consumer prevails, we work on contingency: no fee unless we win.

Our FCRA lawyer guide explains how a case unfolds, and the credit reporting errors overview covers the patterns we see most. Other vehicle lenders appear on our auto lenders page. When you are ready, contact us for a free review.

Frequently asked questions

What did the CFPB find against Santander Consumer USA in 2020?

On December 22, 2020 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau entered a consent order, docket 2020-BCFP-0027, imposing a $4.75 million civil money penalty for Fair Credit Reporting Act furnishing violations during a period running from January 2016 through August 2019. The findings included furnishing information the company knew or had reasonable cause to believe was inaccurate, failing to promptly update and correct, failing to provide the Date of First Delinquency on charged-off and collection accounts, and failing to maintain reasonable written accuracy policies under Regulation V.

What is re-aging and how do I check for it?

Re-aging is resetting the Date of First Delinquency so that adverse information stays on your report past the seven-year period allowed under 15 U.S.C. 1681c. The Bureau found over 23 million instances where Santander Consumer USA set that date equal to the Date of Account Information, which is 35 percent of all delinquency dates it furnished. To check, find a charged-off or collection auto tradeline, locate its Date of First Delinquency, and compare it both to when you actually stopped paying and to the date the tradeline was last updated. Matching dates are a red flag.

Is Chrysler Capital the same company as Santander Consumer USA?

Chrysler Capital is a Santander brand, so a Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram or Fiat financed through Chrysler Capital is serviced and furnished by the same operation described here. We maintain a separate page dedicated to Chrysler Capital reporting issues, but the December 2020 consent order and the delinquency-date analysis on this page apply to both names. Note also that Santander Consumer USA is structurally distinct from the Santander retail bank branches in the northeastern United States.

I got relief in the state settlement but the negative entry is still there.

That is worth pursuing. The 34-state settlement announced May 19, 2020 expressly required Santander to contact the credit reporting agencies and request deletion of negative reports for consumers receiving loan waivers or deficiency relief. Settlement obligations are carried out by operations departments at volume, and entries get missed. Gather your relief documentation, pull all three reports, and dispute the surviving entry in writing with each bureau, attaching the documentation showing the relief you received.

Why does my balance still look wrong right after I paid the loan off?

Possibly because the reporting cycle has not caught up. Santander states that it reports credit information to all three major bureaus at the end of each month, covering the loan or lease amount, balance, scheduled payment, payment history and status, and that it can take up to 30 days for the agencies to update a report. A payoff early in a month may not surface until the following cycle. Wait one full cycle, pull all three reports again, and dispute only if the balance is still wrong after the update has run.

Location does not limit us. The Kim Law Firm represents consumers nationwide in Fair Credit Reporting Act matters, working from our offices in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. If a Santander Consumer USA or Chrysler Capital account carries a delinquency date that was reset, an item that should have aged off years ago, or a balance and status that contradict each other, we would like to hear from you.