When Consumer Protection Stops, Scammers Run Amok

A fintech credit card called Bilt, sold as an easy way to pay rent and promising hefty rewards, is the subject of hundreds of complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Among other complaints, users report that Bilt isn’t depositing rent into landlords’ bank accounts, which forces them to pay twice and eat late fees. When they contact the company, they encounter unhelpful customer service bots that make it a struggle to recoup their losses.

It is a tailor-made situation for the agency established in 2010 to protect consumers from financial abuses. But investigators at the CFPB can’t follow up on Bilt—or any other company, for that matter. If they do, the company can report them via a tip line to get them fired.

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“Are you being pursued by CFPB enforcement or supervision staff, in violation of Acting Director Russ Vought’s stand down order?” reads an account for the tip line on trillionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform, referring to the Christian nationalist author of Project 2025, who is Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. “If so, DM us or send an email.”

Vought effectively dismantled the CFPB, with his stand-down order, mass firings, slashed funding, and other illegal actions. He has chilled supervision and enforcement; routine inquiries into companies generating massive amounts of consumer complaints is over. Executives looking to profit from tricks and traps have gotten the message that the laws aren’t being enforced.

“Some unscrupulous companies are taking it as open season to offer things that are too good to be true,” said Erie Meyer, formerly the chief technologist at the CFPB and now a senior fellow at Columbia Law School. “They know this tip line is up. They know civil servants will be reported if they ask questions.”

As a result, Meyer and other consumer advocates said, companies are speedrunning scams in every state, particularly ones that promise to help with President Trump’s affordability crisis. Consumer complaints to the CFPB more than doubled last year, from 2.7 million to 5.5 million. In the first three months of this year, consumers have already filed nearly 1.5 million complaints, with a spike in the traditional red states in the South, Meyer said. Republican lawmakers last year held a hearing calling for a coordinated response to scams, without acknowledging that they had crushed the agency that did that. Last Wednesday, lawmakers met again to bemoan the “rising global scam economy” and discussed ways to “modernize” federal protections.

Consumer complaints to the CFPB more than doubled last year, from 2.7 million to 5.5 million.

Consumer advocates said to expect more scams that prey on the affordability crisis as GOP policies stretch Americans even more, including through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which severely slashed funding for Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, and other social services.

“People move to some of these newer products [because they] feel really tight on money and are trying to get by,” Meyer said. She cited Bilt in particular, “because it’s a product people are using for their rent payments … It’s not them buying a yacht.”

A CFPB spokesperson did not respond to detailed questions about the tip line, including how many tips companies have sent in since it was created, the number of workers who have been disciplined or dismissed as a result of tips, and what consumers should expect when they file complaints with the agency against companies. The CFPB also did not respond to a Freedom of Information Act request seeking that information.

Bilt is a fintech company founded in 2021 by Ankur Jain, the millennial son of Naveen K. Jain. For a short time during the dot-com stock bubble, the elder Jain’s startup InfoSpace was worth more than weapons manufacturer Boeing. But board members forced him out over insider-trading allegations, and the company crashed along with the market.

The junior Jain marketed his Bilt Rewards Mastercard as a way to pay rent without incurring the fees landlords typically charge for paying rent via credit card. Cardholders also earn reward points, which they can transfer 1:1 for points with partner airline companies and redeem for classes at fitness companies like SoulCycle, among other things. Some rewards increase on rent day, the first day of the month; Bilt cardholders can also draw rewards and get freebies at Bilt’s “Neighborhood Cafe” in lower Manhattan, which it runs with Maman, “a beloved New York café and bakery,” of which international private equity firm TriSpan owns 50 percent. Users can also earn points when they use their Bilt card to pay student loans.

Bilt’s original banking partner was Evolve Bank & Trust, the fintech bank that was at the center of a scandal in 2024 that led to hundreds of thousands of online bank accounts becoming inaccessible, as the Prospect’s David Dayen reported, and whose CEO Robert “Bob” Hartheimer the FBI arrested five months later for child sex crimes, to which he pleaded guilty. Bilt avoided that scandal because it had already switched to a new banking partner following a $60 million growth round in late 2021. Wells Fargo was among the investors and became Bilt’s new banking partner. The company began issuing cards in March 2022. As of last year, Bilt said nearly one million people were cardholders and that the company was bringing in $500 million in revenue.

But as Fintech Business Weekly’s Jason Mikula reported earlier this month, the partnership was “fatally flawed.” Wells Fargo couldn’t make money off the joint venture because few people used the card the way the bank thought they would, such as charging purchases for other items besides rent, or through cross-selling users mortgages and other products. According to a 2024 Wall Street Journal report, Wells Fargo was losing $10 million a month on the card in rewards payouts. The bank ended its partnership last July, four years before it was supposed to conclude in 2029.

Now Bilt has a new partner: Cardless. The banking-as-a-service company handles payment processing for Bilt Card 2.0, while Column N.A. executes payments. As Mikula’s newsletter reported first and as Forbes and In Debt confirmed, the transition has been awful. Instead of the smooth change Bilt promised, users have spent the last several weeks describing financial disasters, including instances where users’ rent payments are processed but don’t make it to the landlord. When they try to contact the company to fix the issues, cardholders are only able to talk to AI chatbots that don’t help in any way, let alone resolve the issues.

“im so exhausted bilt owes me $3000 and by a series of fuck ups, has charged me essentially 3 months of rent in the span of a week and i cant fucking speak to a human im so fucking done,” a Reddit user posted last week to r/biltrewards under the header “ankur – if we can’t trust you to pay our rent on time and act QUICKLY when you’ve mishandled our money, your company is completely worthless.”

Others in the Reddit channel reported that their mortgage payments were reversed for no reason, that their new cards were charged without authorization, and that their money has simply “gone missing.” Some users posted messages about whether they should organize a class action lawsuit or sue; one asked, “Could this be considered as crime which puts you in Jail? I am really looking forward to it for Ankur.”

Consumer complaints to the CFPB in this month alone, meanwhile, describe similar problems with making payments, incurring overcharges, transferring balances, being unable to open and close accounts, and having new cards opened in their names without their consent or knowledge. Multiple users told the agency that Bilt isn’t resolving disputes or providing adequate customer service.

Another potential issue, as Mikula pointed out, is that the Bilt Rewards terms and conditions say Bilt may create a transaction bank account with Evolve, Column N.A., and any other bank that holds payment accounts “for your benefit and the benefit of other Bilt customers that can be used” to pay rent, raising concerns that the company pools customer assets. Doing so potentially allows Bilt to skirt consumer protection components of the 1968 Truth in Lending Act and the 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure, or CARD, Act.

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The language appears in a February 13, 2026, Bilt Rewards Terms & Conditions disclosure. A later disclosure for Bilt Rewards Card Offer Terms, updated March 11, does not mention the transaction bank account.

A Bilt spokesperson said the transaction bank account “relates to rent payment processing not the Bilt credit card,” and that members, “whether they have the Bilt card or not, may choose to receive an account to submit certain housing payments.” The funds are not pooled, he said, but segregated at the customer level, which the spokesman said is “a fairly common structure used in the industry for payment processing.”

The new Bilt cards “attracted unexpectedly high demand, and a small number of members experienced delays in response times that are simply unacceptable to us,” the spokesperson continued, adding that the company “increased our customer service capabilities to address this” and that existing customers should reach out for help.

Though Bilt’s terms and services require customers to resolve disputes through arbitration and indemnify the company against class actions and other lawsuits, consumer advocates told the Prospect that it would still be useful to bring lawsuits. That’s because doing so makes any complaint part of the public record, even if a judge moves the case to arbitration.

Former CFPB program manager Alexis Goldstein said that it is maddening to see companies like Bilt get away with poor treatment of customers. She said Democrats, especially in the Senate, should use any leverage they have to restore the CFPB back to its former funding level and truly fight for the restoration of the agency. Americans can’t afford to be swindled, especially now, when prices for food, housing, gas, and every other necessity are skyrocketing.

“This is exactly the moment when a CFPB would shine and what we were created for,” said Goldstein, whom the Trump administration fired earlier this year and who is now running for Congress in Maryland’s Sixth District.

“The companies know no one is minding the store right now,” she said. “Companies are going to stretch the bounds of what they can get away with … What are the things that have already been happening that people don’t notice?”