Dun & Bradstreet, Inc.

Selling the fix for a problem in your own product

Dun & Bradstreet is a leading provider of business credit reports, which often decide whether and on what terms one business will extend credit to or award a contract to another. Many businesses complained the reports contained errors, including things as basic as a company’s name or address.

According to the FTC’s complaint, D&B failed to give those businesses a clear, consistent and reliable way to get errors corrected. Then, when a business questioned an inaccuracy, D&B pitched it a suite of services called CreditBuilder, costing hundreds or thousands of dollars a year, on the claim that it would let the business add its payment history and so improve its scores.

What the complaint says actually happened

Thousands of CreditBuilder subscribers could not get any payment history added to their reports at all. The FTC alleges D&B refused subscribers’ submissions more often than it accepted them.

Telemarketers also pitched CreditBuilder to new businesses by falsely claiming the business had to buy it so that D&B could run a background check and produce a complete credit report. Subscriptions renewed automatically each year without a clear disclosure, on terms that pushed costs steadily up.

The 2022 order

D&B must delete disputed information or reinvestigate it within set time limits, delete anything it cannot verify and keep it from reappearing, tell businesses the outcome and give free access to the revised report. It must disclose the rate at which it actually accepts payment history submissions before selling CreditBuilder, refund many businesses that first bought between April 2015 and May 2020, and stop using automatic renewal to move a subscriber onto a costlier product they did not order.

Then it broke that order

In September 2025 the Department of Justice, on referral from the FTC, alleged D&B had violated the 2022 order by failing to tell some customers their product’s list price before automatically renewing, failing to stop employees telling prospects that paid products would improve their credit score, and failing to keep required voice recordings.

D&B agreed to pay $5.7 million: $3.7 million for refunds and over $2 million in civil penalties. It must also keep a third-party quality assurance provider tracking whether its telemarketers misrepresent, run a compliance program, have leadership certify compliance annually, and notify the Commission within 60 days of any failure.

As the FTC’s Bureau Director put it: “Our signed orders are not suggestions.”

What is not established

Both orders are settlements and resolve allegations without any admission or finding of wrongdoing.