When Bianca Jones, a 33-year-old special education teacher in Memphis, Tennessee, decided a couple of years ago that she wanted to buy a house, she started digging into her Experian credit report. She was shocked by what she found.

Her student debt had been double-counted, making it look as though she owed a quarter of a million dollars and putting home ownership out of reach. Jones disputed the items with Experian, one of the major credit reporting agencies, multiple times in writing and over the phone, but got nowhere.

“They kept saying it’s been verified, it’s been verified…They never investigated. They never tried to remove it,” Jones said in an interview.

Eventually, Jones complained to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal watchdog created by Congress in 2010 to protect consumers in their financial dealings, helping her lawyers show a judge the lengths she’d gone to mitigate damage to her credit, according to her attorneys, legal papers and a copy of the complaint. That paper trail eventually helped Jones successfully sue Experian to correct her record.

Jones closed on a house purchase in the Memphis suburb of Millington for $300,000 in January.

“If I didn’t have this agency to go to, I don’t think I’d be in the house right now,” said Jones. “It actually changed my life.”

Experian and the CFPB did not respond to a request for comment on Jones’ case.

In interviews, consumers who had fallen on hard times or known difficulty, lawyers who work with the poor and credit counselors told Reuters the CFPB had been a lifeline for people facing hardship and they feared that, without it, many consumers would be left unprotected from financial predators.

Conceived by Senator Elizabeth Warren to police the type of lending that fueled the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB has long been a target of conservatives and industry. Congress created the agency as part of post-crash reforms in 2010 as the sole federal body primarily charged with protecting consumers’ rights in the financial marketplace.

© Fast Company