A bank allegedly asked for deletion. The inquiry stayed.

In August 2019, Capital One told Brooklyn resident Duane Hines that it had asked Equifax to remove a hard inquiry dated November 17, 2018, according to the amended complaint. Hines then sent Equifax a copy of that letter by certified mail.

The inquiry allegedly remained. Equifax’s response said that if it could not make a change from the information Hines supplied, it contacted the company reporting the information and provided relevant supporting documents. Yet the complaint alleges that Equifax did not contact Capital One about his dispute.

Instead, Hines received the language at the center of the case: the inquiry was a record of access, and he should take the problem back to the creditor.

“Inquiries are a factual record of file access. If you believe this was unauthorized, please contact the creditor.” Equifax response quoted in the amended complaint, paragraph 44

That distinction matters. Nobody disputes that a system recorded access to a credit file. The dispute is whether the access was tied to the correct person, occurred for a legally permitted purpose, and was accurately presented as part of that consumer’s credit history.

The alleged dispute loop

A hard inquiry generally records that a company obtained a consumer report in connection with an application or another transaction. The complaint says scoring systems can treat multiple inquiries as signs of greater credit risk. An inquiry that belongs to someone else can therefore present a misleading picture of a person’s behavior.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act provision quoted by the plaintiffs says that when a consumer disputes the completeness or accuracy of an item in a credit file, the reporting agency must conduct a reasonable reinvestigation, record the item’s current status, or delete it. The complaint also quotes a requirement to notify the person who supplied the disputed information and provide all relevant information received from the consumer.

This is a conceptual summary of the plaintiffs’ allegations. It does not represent an adjudicated finding about Equifax’s procedures.

Four consumers describe the same dead end

The details vary, but the complaint presents each account as evidence of a common practice. Every account below is an allegation drawn from the pleading.

The alleged harm goes beyond a line on a report

The plaintiffs claim the disputed inquiries lowered their credit scores, consumed time, caused distress, and deprived them of accurate information about how their disputes were handled. Hines, Oblack, and Neubauer also allege privacy invasions tied to reports obtained without a permissible purpose.

• Credit-file accuracy: The disputed inquiries allegedly portrayed applications the consumers did not make.
• Score effects: The complaint alleges reductions, but it does not quantify the number of points for any plaintiff.
• Time and distress: The accounts describe repeated calls, letters, certified mail, agency complaints, and creditor contacts.
• Privacy concerns: Several plaintiffs say the inquiries signaled that their reports were obtained without authorization or a permissible purpose.

The pleading does not identify a specific denied loan, increased interest rate, or quantified financial loss for the four plaintiffs in the supplied text. Its concrete allegations center on the continuing entries, claimed score reductions, dissemination to later report recipients, lost time, privacy, and distress.

A proposed class, not a proven nationwide violation

The lawsuit seeks to consolidate claims previously pursued in other federal courts and asks to represent consumers across the United States and its territories. The complaint alleges that the challenged responses resulted from standard Equifax policies rather than isolated mistakes.

The plaintiffs say Equifax has represented that it received millions of hard-inquiry disputes in recent years, and they estimate that the proposed groups contain hundreds of thousands of people. Those are assertions in the complaint. The supplied record provides no class data, audit, or certification ruling that establishes the number of qualifying consumers.

What the plaintiffs want, and what has not been decided

The amended complaint asserts federal Fair Credit Reporting Act claims, New York claims, a New Jersey claim, and individual federal claims for Neubauer. It asks for class certification, declarations of legal violations, damages, fees, and, for the New York claims, orders requiring compliance with state law.

For claims characterized as willful FCRA violations, the plaintiffs request statutory damages of $100 to $1,000 per violation per class member, plus potential actual and punitive damages. Those figures are requested remedies. They are not an award, judgment, or established total.

The complaint quotes Equifax’s consumer-facing correspondence, but it does not supply the company’s litigation response. It therefore does not show whether Equifax disputes the plaintiffs’ interpretation of the law, contests their descriptions of its internal process, challenges whether the inquiries were inaccurate, or raises defenses specific to each consumer.