What It Costs When Your Credit Score Is the Last Thing You Have

Credit scores are not abstract numbers. For millions of Americans, a bad credit score means you can’t rent an apartment, get a car loan, open a bank account, or sometimes even get a job. The people who search for credit-building services are not doing it casually. They are doing it because they are in a corner. They’re recovering from medical debt, a divorce, a layoff, a period of housing instability. They’re immigrants whose foreign credit history doesn’t translate to U.S. scores. They’re young adults trying to start their financial lives. They came to TomoCredit specifically because they were told, in large friendly fonts on a professional website, that relief was right there, just $20 or $34 or $129 a month away, and it would be fast.

The reviews in this complaint don’t read like standard consumer complaints. They read like people describing being robbed during an emergency. One person spent six months trying to cancel while being charged continuously. Another had to close their entire bank account, not just change a card but close the account, to stop the charges from coming through. A third watched their credit score go down after paying TomoCredit, not up. Several people describe receiving threatening emails from TomoCredit warning that their credit would be hurt if they cancelled, using the exact fear that drove them to sign up as a weapon to keep them paying. One reviewer, BT, paid over $475 for a VIP membership and never had a single tradeline reported to any bureau. Another paid for six months before discovering that all three major bureaus had already cut off TomoCredit’s reporting access, making the product structurally impossible to deliver, and when they requested a refund, the company denied it on the basis of its own terms of service, then deleted their support account to eliminate the paper trail.

Jerae David had their account closed by TomoCredit in 2021 and was locked out. Then, in August 2023, without any re-enrollment or fresh consent, charges started appearing again on their account. Two years later. The company reactivated a dormant account and started billing them as though no time had passed. To make it stop, they had to close their entire bank account.

One reviewer who never even signed up, Deanna Lewis, tried only to ask a question before joining and was blocked from reaching anyone. After reading the reviews and deciding not to subscribe, she found she could not get TomoCredit to stop emailing her. The company that wouldn’t respond to paying customers emailing to cancel pursued a non-customer with promotional emails she couldn’t unsubscribe from.

This is the non-financial cost: hours on the phone with banks disputing charges, the anxiety of watching your account get hit over and over again on the same day, the bureaucratic humiliation of having to prove to your bank that you did not consent to charges from a company you have been trying to leave for eight months. The people who chose TomoCredit were already financially vulnerable. The company found them in that vulnerability, took their money, delivered nothing, and made it as hard as legally possible to leave. The complaint calls this a “clear attempt to use the Plaintiff’s need for a boost in credit to hook them into an autorenewal subscription they cannot get out of.” That is a corporate description of predation.

Verbatim: What the Complaint Proves They Knew and Did

These are direct quotes from the filed class action complaint and from consumer reviews entered into the court record as evidence. These are not summaries or interpretations.

Anatomy of a Subscription Trap: How TomoCredit’s System Was Designed to Extract Money

The complaint lays out, step by step, a product architecture that has every hallmark of a deliberate extraction scheme rather than a failed service. Each design choice compounds the one before it.

• The website for TomoBoost (www.tomocredit.com/boost) presents large marketing claims prominently: “Build Credit Fast,” a promised 105+ point boost, and a web page title that reads “TomoBoost: Boost Your Credit Score 200+ Fast with AI.” These numbers are headline-featured to catch people searching for credit repair.
• The pricing page offers three tiers (Starter, Premium, VIP). The VIP plan is labeled “Instant,” and a pop-up warns users clicking on the Starter plan that it is “2xs slower” than VIP. A reasonable consumer reading this would understand instant to mean same-day or near-immediate results.
• At the time Plaintiff Geagley subscribed in October 2025, the service was approximately $20 per month. However, the complaint documents single charges as high as $979.99 and recurring monthly amounts of $34.99, $49, $62, $99, $129.99, and $475 for a six-month VIP plan, suggesting significant pricing variation and/or undisclosed upgrade charges.
• After subscribing, the confirmation screen again repeats “Build credit fast,” continuing the performance promise loop throughout the onboarding flow.
• When the service fails to deliver and a customer tries to cancel, they encounter a deliberate maze: the cancel option is visually buried in small, non-conspicuous font below large, prominent advertisements for longer-term or more expensive plans.
• Clicking the cancellation link does not cancel the subscription. It triggers a screen requiring the user to schedule a phone call with TomoBoost before cancellation can proceed. There is documented to be no way around this gate.
• If the customer reaches the phone channel, the complaint and reviews document that calls are not answered, emails receive automated responses, and “customer service” is functionally non-existent. Multiple reviewers describe spending two months, six months, or eight months in this loop with no resolution.
• After “cancellation,” charges continue. Some reviewers report charges continuing for more than a year. One user won a bank dispute, only to be charged $979.99 exactly one year later using the same card information TomoCredit had retained.
• TomoCredit also reportedly changed its billing descriptor from TOMOBOOST to BUILD YOUR CREDIT, a move that makes it harder for consumers to identify the charge when reviewing statements and harder for card issuers to match dispute claims to prior transactions.
• The complaint alleges that TomoCredit deliberately kept all complaints out of public court view by engineering a website visit as implied consent to a binding mandatory arbitration agreement that also waives class action rights, meaning each defrauded customer would have to pursue the company individually, a barrier the company knew most consumers would not clear.

Who Gets Hurt and How: The Full Scale of the Damage

Public Health

Financial stress is a documented driver of physical and mental health deterioration. The specific population TomoCredit targeted, people with poor or no credit history, already faces disproportionate exposure to financial precarity, and the company’s conduct compounded existing harm.

• Consumers already in financial distress paid subscription fees ranging from $20 to over $475 for a service that, in many documented cases, did nothing or made their credit scores worse. For people operating on tight margins, these losses represent rent money, grocery money, and emergency fund depletion.
• Multiple reviewers describe spending hours or months managing the fallout: filing bank disputes, communicating with card issuers, monitoring accounts daily for unauthorized charges, and closing accounts. The complaint specifically cites “loss of time and frustration” as compensable damages alongside financial injury, recognizing that time spent fighting a predatory company is a real cost.
• TomoCredit’s documented use of fear-based retention tactics, warning customers that their credit score will drop if they cancel, exploited the psychological anxiety already associated with poor credit standing. The people most vulnerable to this threat are those whose credit scores are already precarious.
• One customer was compelled to close their entire bank account to stop unauthorized charges, a disruptive financial event that requires updating every automated payment, payroll deposit, and linked account the customer had, a multi-day administrative burden on top of the original harm.

Economic Inequality

The credit-building industry is structurally concentrated on low-income and economically marginalized populations. TomoCredit’s specific marketing language and product framing make clear who the target customer was, and those are precisely the people least equipped to absorb the losses.

• The proposed Credit Builder Class covers all U.S. customers who paid and received no credit boost within 30 days. Plaintiff’s counsel believes this class numbers in the hundreds or thousands, if not more. At even $20 per person per month with six months of failed cancellation attempts, the aggregate theft from this population runs into the millions of dollars, which is why the complaint establishes $5 million+ in aggregate damages to qualify for federal jurisdiction under CAFA.
• Immigrants and people new to the U.S. credit system are a core demographic for credit-building products. These users often lack knowledge of how to dispute charges, navigate the American banking system, or identify small-print arbitration clauses. The complaint’s allegation that TomoCredit buried the arbitration agreement at the bottom of a linked PDF, triggerable by merely visiting the website, is particularly exploitative of this population.
• The complaint documents that TomoCredit attempted to charge some accounts multiple times per day, in some cases attempting five charges per day. For consumers with low account balances, this pattern can trigger insufficient funds fees from their bank on every failed attempt, compounding the financial harm with third-party penalty fees that TomoCredit is not paying.
• TomoCredit specifically claims to be “Trusted by 4 million+ people building credit.” If even a fraction of those users experienced non-delivery, impossible cancellation, or continued unauthorized billing, the scale of wealth extraction from financially vulnerable Americans is enormous. The complaint’s class definition covers every U.S. customer who paid and experienced either no boost or a difficult cancellation, which based on the volume and consistency of public reviews represents a pattern of systemic, not isolated, harm.
• The arbitration clause TomoCredit triggered automatically, combined with the class action waiver, was explicitly designed to prevent collective accountability. By making each consumer fight alone, the company ensured that the cost of recovering a $20 or $99 or even $475 loss would always exceed the cost of simply absorbing it. This is an economic calculation, and it is documented in the complaint as intentional: “a clear attempt to use the Plaintiff’s need for a boost in credit to hook them into an autorenewal subscription and/or negative option program that they cannot get out of.”
• James Pendleton reported wasting $1,000 on a plan for which no card was ever registered. Arizoina_User was charged $979.99 one year after winning a bank dispute. The single-transaction amounts make clear this was not a low-cost consumer app but a product extracting significant sums from people who could least afford the loss.

The Number That Explains Why They Did It

The Watchlist and What You Can Do Right Now

This lawsuit is in its early stages; the class has not yet been certified. The fight to hold TomoCredit accountable is just beginning, and it requires pressure from multiple directions simultaneously.

Who Is Being Sued

• TomoCredit, Inc. — Defendant. Principal place of business: 301 Howard Street, Suite 950, San Francisco, California 94105. Incorporated in Delaware. Operates TomoCredit.com and TomoBoost.com.
• William Geagley — Named Plaintiff, Mountaindale, Sullivan County, New York. Subscribed to the TomoBoost Premium Journey Plan in October 2025. Zero credit boost observed. Cancellation system failed repeatedly.
• Francis J. “Casey” Flynn, Jr. (#304712) — Lead plaintiff’s attorney, Law Offices of Francis J. Flynn, Jr., Los Angeles, CA.
• Joseph Lyon (#351117) — Co-counsel, The Lyon Firm, Irvine, CA.

Regulatory Watchlist

• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): Primary federal regulator for negative option marketing and subscription trap violations. The complaint directly cites FTC Section 5 and the FTC’s own five-principle framework on negative options, which TomoCredit allegedly violated on multiple counts. File a complaint at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB): The CFPB has jurisdiction over financial service products like credit-building subscriptions. One reviewer specifically tried to report TomoCredit to the CFPB and reported finding the company “nowhere to be found.” The CFPB can investigate and compel records even when a company obscures its registration. Submit complaints at ConsumerFinance.gov/complaint.
• California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI): TomoCredit is headquartered in San Francisco and its conduct is subject to California’s Automatic Renewal Law (Bus. & Prof. Code § 17600) and Unfair Competition Law (§ 17200). The DFPI regulates fintech companies operating in California. File at DFPI.ca.gov.
• California Attorney General’s Office: Multiple reviewers have already stated they filed or intended to file complaints. The AG’s Consumer Protection Section enforces both the UCL and the CLRA. File at oag.ca.gov/contact/consumer-complaint-against-business-or-individual.
• Your State Attorney General: If you are not in California, your state AG’s consumer protection division has jurisdiction over deceptive practices committed against state residents. The complaint alleges violations of California law as well as New York law (plaintiff is a New York resident) and other applicable state statutes.
• Better Business Bureau: TomoCredit already holds an F rating. Adding your documented complaint strengthens the public record and increases the likelihood of regulatory attention. File at bbb.org.

Mutual Aid and Grassroots Action

• If you are a current or former TomoBoost subscriber: Document everything now. Screenshot your subscription confirmation, every cancellation attempt, every email exchange, and every billing record. Courts rely on this documentation. The complaint is already filed; you may be a class member without having to do anything else, but your records could strengthen the case and any regulatory investigation.
• Contact your card issuer immediately: File a dispute for every charge you did not authorize or that continued after documented cancellation. Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, card issuers are required to investigate disputes and temporarily reverse charges while the investigation is pending. State clearly that you attempted to cancel and were denied.
• Post verified, factual reviews on Trustpilot and the BBB: The class action complaint literally entered consumer reviews into the court record as evidence of a pattern of conduct. Your review is part of the public record and part of the accountability mechanism. Review platforms are the only public space where TomoCredit cannot invoke arbitration.
• Warn your community: TomoCredit’s marketing targets people who are already financially stressed and may not have time to research before subscribing. Share this investigation, the complaint filing, and the Trustpilot review page in community financial literacy groups, immigrant support networks, and any space where people discuss credit building. The people who almost signed up but saw the reviews and didn’t, several of whom are in the complaint record, saved themselves real money because someone else wrote a review.
• Support the class action: If you were a TomoBoost subscriber who received no credit boost within 30 days or who had difficulty canceling, you may be a member of the proposed Credit Builder Class or Cancellation Class. Contact plaintiff’s counsel directly: Casey Flynn at casey@lawofficeflynn.com or Joseph Lyon at jlyon@thelyonfirm.com.