This page is for reporting a company. If you have a personal debt question and want help with your own situation, that is a different door — please use Ask Steve instead. I keep the two separate on purpose, and a question sent here will get a slower answer than it deserves.
What a tip is, and what I do with it
A tip is a lead. It is not a story, and I never publish one on its own.
Here is my policy, in plain terms:
- I never publish tips alone. They help me find consumer problems — but only to the point where I can prove them. Outside of that they are informative only.
- I go and check. Court records, regulator filings, the company’s own documents. If I cannot verify it, I do not write it.
- If required by law, or on request from a consumer regulator, tips may be released to the requesting party. I want you to know that before you write to me, not after.
- I read every one myself. I cannot always reply, and a reply is not a promise to investigate.
Please do not send me anything you are not allowed to send. If you are under a non-disclosure agreement, a protective order, or a duty of confidentiality to an employer or client, honor it. If you are a whistleblower with a formal claim, talk to a lawyer before you talk to me — going to a journalist first can cost you protections you would otherwise have.
Send it through the form
What the form keeps, in plain terms. It saves your message, and the city and state it was sent from. It does not keep your IP address, your browser details, or any record of what else you looked at on this site — those are discarded. I keep the city and state because it helps me judge a tip: a complaint about a local outfit that arrives from the other side of the country tells me something, and so does one that does not. If you leave the email field blank, I do not have your name or your address — though I will see roughly what part of the country you are in.
Or write to me directly
If you would rather use your own email — or you want to send something the form cannot take — you can write to me directly.
Show my tips address
tips@getoutofdebt.org
A plain email is not anonymous — it carries your address and usually your name. If anonymity matters to you, use the form above and leave the email field blank.
What helps most
The tips I can actually act on tend to have the same things in them:
- A name I can look up — the company, and the state it operates in if you know it.
- Dates and dollar amounts. “They charged me $1,200 in March” beats “they charged a lot.”
- What you were told, and by whom. Exact wording matters more than you would think.
- Whether documents exist — a contract, a letter, a screenshot. Do not send them at first. Tell me they exist and I will ask.
- Whether it happened to you, or you saw it happen to someone else.
And one thing that does not help: telling me a company is bad without telling me what it did. I cannot check an opinion.
