Guess who can scan your credit!

Monday, Mar 10 in Credit score | Comments (3)

Question: Bill received a phone call asking him to refinance his mortgage. He said no, but the person keeps calling. The last message left said it would be reported on his credit. He has no credit cards and is debt free except the house. He learned that banks check his credit report regularly.

Dave Ramsey's advice: They are doing a marketing check, or someone you do business with is a subsidiary of theirs is doing it. Once you've got a loan with someone, they have a business reason to check your credit. You can stop the checks by calling each of the credit bureaus and requesting that people can't check your credit. That will also reduce your junk mail.

Hear the call!

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Just for reference, I discovered a website where you can opt-out of these marketing pre-screens. When submitted online, the opt-out is good for 5 years. As Dave has said, you can also write in and opt-out for life.

For anyone who's interested, here's the site: <a href="https://www.optoutprescreen.com">https://w...;

# Posted by Deb | 3/11/08 1:11 PM

Dave was wrong on this call about the marketing inquiries being displayed to other entities that look at the credit report. There is no need to have them removed. They are called soft inquiries and are never displayed except to the consumer when they look at their own credit report.
Soft Inquiries do not affect your score at all, no one ever sees them. The FCRA requires them to be kept, so they can not be deleted either.

# Posted by Rich | 3/19/08 6:03 PM

Another horrible thing is that they don't need your SSN to pull your credit. They can simply do it with your name and address. TD Ameritrade did this to me and I never even talked to them or responded to their junk mail.

# Posted by John | 5/20/08 2:30 PM

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