The FTC just made an example out of Amazon.

The company agreed to pay $2.25 million to settle claims it broke the Fair Credit Reporting Act. That’s the largest penalty ever handed down for this specific kind of FCRA violation. If you run background checks on job candidates, that headline should get your attention. Not because you’re Amazon. Because you’re bound by the same law.

What Amazon actually did

Here’s the part worth understanding. Amazon’s case wasn’t about hiring.

The FTC went after a section of the FCRA called 609(e). It requires companies to hand identity theft victims the records tied to fraud committed in their name, within 30 days of a request. Amazon kept saying no. According to the complaint, the company didn’t even have a written policy for handling these requests until early 2025, and only after it learned the FTC was investigating.

One detail stands out. To get their records, some victims first had to name the identity thief who opened the fraudulent account. The problem? That name lived inside the very records they were asking for. No records, no name. No name, no records.

So people were left guessing. That was the process.

Why this matters if you hire

So why should an employer running background checks care about a case that started with stolen credit cards?

Because it’s a signal. The FTC is enforcing the FCRA aggressively, and it’s willing to set records doing it. This was only the second time the agency has ever used Section 609(e). The first was Kohl’s back in 2020. When a regulator starts reaching for a tool it almost never touches, that’s a trend, not a one-off.

The consequences don’t end with a check, either. Amazon’s settlement locks the company into ten years of compliance reporting, recordkeeping, and monitoring. FCRA trouble has a long tail.

And the employment side of the FCRA is where most companies get exposed. FCRA lawsuits jumped 37.4% in 2025, climbing to 8,369 filings from 6,092 the year before. Most never make headlines. They’re class actions built on paperwork mistakes. A disclosure form with too much text on it. An adverse action notice that skipped a step.

Here’s the good news. That pressure is avoidable. The employers who end up in court are almost always the ones running FCRA on their own. That’s where we come in. Catapult keeps your screening process clean and your paperwork airtight, so a technical slip never turns into a class action. See how we keep you covered.

Where employers get caught

The FCRA is strict about how you run and act on a background check. A few of the places employers slip:

You need a permissible purpose. You can only pull a report for a legitimate reason, and you have to handle the results consistently across every candidate.
The disclosure and authorization has to stand alone. Before you pull a report, you have to give the applicant a clear, standalone disclosure and get their written permission. Burying it inside the job application or padding it with extra language is one of the most common reasons employers end up in court.
Adverse action is a two-step process. If you’re going to reject someone based on what a report says, you can’t just send a rejection. You owe them a pre-adverse action letter first, with a copy of the report and a summary of their rights. Then a reasonable wait. Then the final notice.

Miss any of these and the fix isn’t cheap. Statutory damages, class actions, and state penalties stack up fast, even when nobody was actually harmed.

The real lesson

Strip away the details and the Amazon case comes down to one thing. The company tried to handle a federal compliance obligation with a generic customer service script and no written policy. That’s the same mistake that sinks employers who treat background checks as a box to tick.

Guessing isn’t a compliance strategy. Neither is a disclosure form you copied off the internet a few years ago.

How Catapult keeps you covered

This is exactly what we do.

Catapult is a licensed consumer reporting agency and a member of the Professional Background Screening Association, the gold standard in our industry. We run background checks that are fast, thorough, and built to hold up. Criminal records at the federal, state, and county level. Employment and education verification. MVR, drug screening, sanctions and watchlist checks, and continuous monitoring.

More important, we carry the compliance weight for you. Proper disclosure and authorization forms. Individualized adverse action procedures. Dispute rights notifications. Records retention. We stay current on North Carolina and multi-state employer requirements, so you’re not tracking a patchwork of local rules on your own.

Your background check process shouldn’t be the thing that keeps you up at night.

Let’s make sure it isn’t.

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Catapult Services Corporation is an investigative agency licensed by the Private Protective Services Board of the State of North Carolina specializing in corporate pre-employment background screening. Our corporate agency license is BPN 001473P11M, Qualify Agent, Kevin von der Lippe, PI, 2891. Catapult Services Corporation is a consumer reporting agency that supplies applicant screening services for employment, volunteer and student screening, to authorized organizations under the conditions of the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act.