Last reviewed: 13 September 2026

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Our standard

Nine checks, each tied to a specific federal rule or a plainly checkable fact — not a subjective "quality" score. A company either meets a point or it doesn't, and we say which, and why.

The checklist

1. No advance fees before resultsFails if any main fee is charged before a specific promised outcome (a settled debt, a removed item) is actually delivered. This is the Credit Repair Organizations Act's core prohibition (15 U.S.C. § 1679b(b)) for credit-repair services, and the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule Advance Fee Rule (effective 27 October 2010) for debt-settlement services sold by phone — two separate rules for two related business models. We check them separately: a debt-settlement company's main success fee tied to actual settlement can be lawful even though a small recurring "account servicing" fee that starts on day one, regardless of results, is a different thing we log and disclose on its own — not folded into a single pass/fail.
2. No guaranteed-results claimsFails on any specific, quotable promise of a score increase or the removal of accurate negative information — both are prohibited claims under CROA regardless of whether a fee was charged in advance. "Guarantee" isn't one thing in this industry, so we score three variants differently: a satisfaction-only refund that explicitly disclaims promising any outcome (the most defensible form), a refund conditioned on an outcome actually occurring (closer to the prohibited territory), and a "we'll keep working free" service-extension promise (not a refund at all, and worth knowing which one a company is actually offering before assuming "guarantee" means your money back).
3. CFPB complaint history disclosedComplaint volume and resolution pattern, sourced directly from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's public Consumer Complaint Database, not self-reported by the company.
4. FTC / state AG / self-regulatory enforcement historyAny open or settled action against the company or its principals, current or historical, checked against FTC and state attorney general litigation records — and, since it's a real and citable middle tier of evidence between "no action" and full government enforcement, adverse findings from industry self-regulatory bodies like the National Advertising Division (NAD), when one exists and is publicly documented.
5. Published, flat fee scheduleFails on "call for pricing" or a fee that scales with unstated variables.
6. State registration / bonding where requiredMost states require credit-services organizations to register and/or post a bond. Verified against the relevant state's own registry — not taken from the company's own claim.
7. Dispute-process transparencyDiscloses what it actually files — which bureaus, which items, on what legal basis — rather than treating the process as a proprietary black box.
8. Named company, real address, working contact, clean ownership historyAnonymous ownership, a PO-box-only address, or no working contact method is an automatic fail. We also check whether the current entity is a successor to, or an operating name (d/b/a) of, a company with its own enforcement history — a brand can carry a clean recent complaint record while operating under new ownership after a predecessor entity was penalized or went bankrupt, and we treat that history as the same company's for this check.
9. Cancellation-rights disclosureCROA's mandated three-business-day right to cancel is stated plainly in the contract, not buried in fine print.

What a passing score means — and doesn't

Passing every point means a company's public-facing practices and complaint record didn't show a violation of these specific, checkable facts as of the date we looked. It is not a guarantee the company will get you a specific result — no legitimate company can promise that, which is exactly point 2 above. It also isn't a claim that we've reviewed every contract that company has ever issued; see the Register for how findings are dated and re-checked.

Why this is checkable at all

Most predatory industries operate in a genuine gray area — "was this claim misleading" is a judgment call. Credit repair is different: charging an advance fee is either true or false, a specific guarantee claim either exists in writing or it doesn't, and a CFPB complaint count is a public number. That's what makes a standard like this possible without it collapsing into opinion.