TransUnion Will Pay $100 Automatically to About 21,000 People It Reported as Bankrupt Who Never Were — and Roughly $1,000 More to Those Who Swear It Cost Them. Claims Close October 30.

The named plaintiff, William Norman Brooks III, has never filed for bankruptcy. A different William Eugene Brooks in Alabama had, and the two men share the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. According to the court's class-certification memorandum of August 1, 2024, a vendor that Bank of America uses to watch for customer bankruptcies matched the Alabama filing to the California customer, and the bank “incorrectly reported to Trans Union that more than one of Plaintiff's Bank of America accounts had been impacted by the Alabama bankruptcy.” On January 17, 2020, Brooks wrote to TransUnion “explaining, with documentation, that he had never filed for bankruptcy” — he attached the Alabama court record, which did not match his Social Security card, driver's license or California address. The court's account continues: “Despite Plaintiff's attempts to correct his Trans Union file, Trans Union sold Plaintiff's credit report containing an incorrect bankruptcy notation in March 2020. Subsequently, Plaintiff's application to refinance his mortgage was denied.”

The legal theory is narrow and mechanical, which is why it could be certified as a class. A TransUnion credit report has two places a bankruptcy can appear: the public-record section, fed by court filings, and a “remark” a lender attaches to an individual account (a “tradeline”). The lawsuit, brought under section 1681e(b) of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, says that when a tradeline carries a bankruptcy remark but the same report shows no bankruptcy in the public-record section, TransUnion should cross-check before selling it — a procedure the papers say it applied to joint accounts but not to individual ones. TransUnion's data, as recited in the certification ruling, gives the scale: in January 2020 alone, 185,232 TransUnion files contained a tradeline bankruptcy remark with no corresponding public record, and 17,098 of them were the subject of a hard inquiry that month; in March 2021 the figures were 138,077 and 14,816. TransUnion denies wrongdoing and, the notice says, “argues that it was still accurate to report bankruptcy information about members of the Settlement Class.”

The case was filed in January 2022 and spent two years in class discovery. Judge Marston, who inherited it in May 2024 after the death of Judge Gene E.K. Pratter, certified the class on August 1, 2024; TransUnion moved to decertify on July 31, 2025, “on the eve of the parties' second scheduled mediation,” and lost that motion on December 2, 2025. With Magistrate Judge Carol Sandra Moore Wells mediating, the parties reached a settlement in principle on March 5, 2026, filed the motion for preliminary approval on April 23, argued it in late June, and got the preliminary approval order on July 6, 2026. If you received a notice about this case in May or June 2025, that was the class-certification notice; the order required the settlement notice to go out by email and mail by August 31, 2026, with a Claim Number and PIN that also tell you which group you are in.

The class is everyone in the United States and its territories about whom TransUnion sold a report to a third party between January 6, 2020 and January 31, 2023 that “included a bankruptcy remark on a tradeline, but with no reference to a bankruptcy record in the public record section of the same report, and for whom there is no government-held public record of a bankruptcy filing within ten (10) years prior to the date of the report.” The plaintiff's expert, Jonathan Jaffe, built the list in two steps: first from TransUnion's own files, then by running each nine-digit Social Security number through PACER. That second step is what splits the class.

No Bankruptcy Group — about 21,000 people. No bankruptcy filing could be found under their Social Security number at all. They receive an automatic $100, no claim required, as long as their notice was not returned undeliverable and they do not opt out; roughly $2,100,000 of the fund is reserved for those checks. They may also file a claim for a further payment that the papers estimate at “approximately $1,000, in addition to their automatic payment of $100.”

Aged Bankruptcy Group — about 36,000 people. The PACER search did find a bankruptcy under their number, but one filed more than ten years before the report — too old, the plaintiff argues, to be reported. These class members get nothing automatically. The notice is blunt: “If you do not make a Valid Claim as described below, you will not receive any money, and you will give up your right to bring your own lawsuit against Trans Union about claims related to inaccurate bankruptcy remark reporting.” With a claim, the estimate is “approximately $350.” The notice's reason for the split, which the court accepted, is that the aged group “would face additional risks if the case moved forward” — TransUnion's argument that reporting an old bankruptcy remark is not inaccurate has never been decided.

The mechanism behind both estimates is a points system. The settlement agreement reserves $2,882,900 as a Claims Fund. Every valid claim from the No Bankruptcy Group gets 3 pro rata points; every valid claim from the Aged Bankruptcy Group gets 1. The Claims Fund is divided by the total points, so a No Bankruptcy claimant always receives exactly three times what an Aged Bankruptcy claimant receives — and both amounts move with the number of people who file. The website says so in its own words: “These estimates are based upon the typical claims rates in similar cases – the actual payment amounts will depend on the actual claims rates in this case and may be lower or higher.”

The one-page claim form is where most summaries go quiet. Section II, “Claim Certification,” has two parts. First: “I did not file for bankruptcy in the ten years before the Report Request Date listed in the records of Trans Union.” Second, you must “check at least one box”: “My Trans Union credit score decreased as a result of the inclusion of bankruptcy information in my file” or “I was denied credit, and one reason for the denial was the inclusion of bankruptcy information on a Trans Union credit report.” Then: “I certify subject to the penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.” The court's memorandum confirms that a claim without one of those two boxes is not a valid claim. No documents are required — the form asks for a signature, not a denial letter — but it is a sworn statement, and the phrase “to the best of my knowledge, information, and belief” on the form is the only softening.

For the No Bankruptcy Group, then, the $100 is unconditional and the extra roughly $1,000 is conditional on that oath. For the Aged Bankruptcy Group, the oath is the price of any payment at all. Claims are filed online at BrooksBankruptcyClassAction.com using the Claim Number and PIN from the notice, or on paper postmarked by October 30, 2026 to Brooks v. Trans Union, LLC, c/o Settlement Administrator, P.O. Box 16, West Point, PA 19486. The online form lets you choose an electronic payment; otherwise a paper check goes to the address on the form. If you have moved since 2023, the “Address Verification” page on the site is where to fix it — the automatic $100 goes to the address TransUnion has for you.

The papers do not state the claims rate the estimates rest on, but it can be recovered from the numbers they do give. Here is our arithmetic. $2,882,900 in the Claims Fund, an expected payment of about $1,000 for three points and about $350 for one point, means roughly $340 per point and therefore about 8,500 points claimed in total. With 21,000 people worth three points each and 36,000 worth one, that is what you get if roughly 8.5 percent of each group files. In other words, “approximately $1,000” is what happens if about eleven out of twelve class members never send in the form.

Two features push the other way. The sworn certification will keep some people from filing, which raises the payment for those who do. And the class is small and was individually notified twice — unlike the large consumer-privacy settlements where single-digit claims rates are common. Where it lands is unknowable until October 30; the table is only meant to show that the figure on the notice is a midpoint, not a floor.

The rest of the fund is spoken for. Class counsel, Francis Mailman Soumilas, P.C., will ask for $2,770,000 in fees — one-third of the fund, although the court's memorandum describes it as 30 percent — plus up to $308,000 in expenses; the motion is due October 16, two weeks before the objection deadline, so anyone who wants to read it before objecting can. Brooks is to receive up to $50,000, which the papers describe as both a service award and a settlement of his separate individual claims, for which he gives a broader release than the class. Administration is estimated at $210,000, with the first $210,000 due into the fund by July 13, 2026. Fees, expenses, the award and administration together come to about $3.34 million, or 40 percent of the $8.31 million, by our count. Nothing reverts to TransUnion: if money is left after the first checks and it is enough to pay at least $10 to everyone who cashed one, there is a second distribution; otherwise the remainder goes to two consumer-credit nonprofits, one chosen by each side.

As of September 18, 2026, every deadline is ahead.

Payment is not December 2. Under the agreement the “Effective Date” is seven days after the final approval order if nobody objects; if anyone does, it is seven days after the time to appeal to the Third Circuit runs out, or after any appeal is resolved. TransUnion pays the balance of the fund within ten days of that date, and the administrator sends payments within twenty. With no objections, that points to late December 2026 or January 2027; a single objection followed by an appeal would push it well into 2027. Checks are void 60 days after mailing.

This is the third TransUnion matter to carry the phrase “credit report settlement” in two years, and they do not overlap. The $23 million Norman settlement over mishandled disputes of hard inquiries paid automatically in the fall of 2025 and is closed. The July 2025 data breach is a consolidated lawsuit in Chicago with no settlement and no claim form. This one is about bankruptcy remarks, and the only way to know you are in it is the notice with a Claim Number and PIN — the administrator's line is (888) 279-4003. Anyone who never filed for bankruptcy and was reported as if they had should also pull their current TransUnion report: the settlement pays for the past, it does not fix the file.