Capital One 2.4M Settlement Over Wrongly Reporting Customers as Deceased on Credit Reports

Mistakenly being labeled “deceased” on a credit report can derail everyday financial life, because lenders and other decision-makers rely heavily on credit bureau data to verify identity and assess risk. In **Kromrey, et al. v. Capital One N.A.** (E.D. Va.), plaintiffs say Capital One furnished information tied to certain credit card accounts that led credit reporting agencies to flag living customers as dead—and that when the credit bureaus sent disputes about that “deceased” status, Capital One did not properly fix the error. Capital One has agreed to a **$2.4 million** class settlement covering people reported as deceased based on Capital One credit card information where disputes were submitted between **Aug. 13, 2019, and Dec. 3, 2025**, and the deceased reporting allegedly wasn’t corrected; affected class members generally **do not need to file a claim** to receive a payment, with opt-out/objection due **Feb. 18, 2026** and a final approval hearing set for **March 20, 2026**. The lawsuit centers on duties imposed by the **Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)**, a federal law that governs both credit bureaus and “furnishers” like banks: when a furnisher receives a dispute from a credit reporting agency, it must conduct a reasonable investigation and correct or update inaccurate information. Plaintiffs argue that failing to adequately investigate “deceased” disputes can cause concrete harm—such as **credit denials, higher interest rates, or trouble opening accounts**—making the case significant beyond the dollar amount because it reinforces that even rare-seeming data errors can have outsized real-world consequences. More broadly, this settlement fits a pattern of FCRA litigation targeting inaccurate reporting and weak dispute-handling processes across the industry, reflecting ongoing regulatory and consumer pressure on banks and credit bureaus to improve data quality, identity matching, and escalation procedures when high-impact “mixed file” or identity-status errors (like a death indicator) appear in a consumer’s credit file.