The Tutela Digitalis Complaint Outcome Index

What actually happens after a scam victim escalates to the United States federal regulator. 2,893 complaints, counted from the raw records rather than taken from anyone's summary. Selection rule: every complaint in the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database whose own consumer narrative contains the word "scam". Received 2026-01-01 to 2026-07-26, extracted 2026-08-16. Headline: 9.3% closed with money. 85.1% closed with an explanation. Companies answered on time 97.9% of the time. The process is not failing on compliance. Companies respond, promptly and within the rules. Almost nobody is made whole. A control that goes against the obvious story. The seven banks that own Zelle's operator closed 10.1% of 978 complaints with money, against 9.1% for the rest of the market excluding the operator itself. They are marginally better than the market, not worse. It is published because it contradicts the preferred headline. Contents. A company-level table of 18 companies with at least 25 complaints (2,046 of 2,893 records, 70.7%), plus overall totals and breakdowns by product, sub-product and population, as CSV and JSON with a documented method. Two traps in the method. Monetary relief means the CFPB category "Closed with monetary relief" and nothing else; folding in "non-monetary relief" inflates every rate by roughly half, so it is kept as its own column. And a CFPB complaint is a second-line escalation: this population had already been refused by the company, so these rates describe what happens on appeal and are not comparable to first-line claim approval rates at a bank. Compare routes, never rates. Derived aggregates only. No complaint narratives, complaint IDs, ZIP codes or states are republished. The underlying records remain available from the CFPB directly, which is the correct place to obtain them. Compiled and published by Tutela Digitalis, an independent fraud-education project with no vendor, platform or advertiser funding. Live version: https://www.tuteladigitalis.com/complaint-outcome-index Changes in 1.0.1. Corrects the company threshold. Version 1.0.0 described the relief range as 0% to 34.9%, which is the maximum among institutions with at least 25 complaints, while its data files were cut at 20 and so contained two smaller institutions, one of them above that stated range. The threshold is 25 throughout, matching the published index. The corpus, the overall figures and every retained row are unchanged, and 1.0.0 remains permanently available.