How To Remove Unauthorized Credit Inquiries From Your Credit Reports

Credit inquiries occur when companies review your credit reports to establish whether to give you credit. Credit inquiries do not have a huge impact on your credit score. Compared to issues like late payments, foreclosure, or account collections, the effect is less. Still, they do count. Typically, there are hard and soft inquiries.

• A hard inquiry impacts your credit score.  To many hard inquires made in a short period of time will harm your credit score.
• A soft inquiry is one that doesn’t impact your credit score.  When you pull your credit yourself, you will trigger a soft credit inquiry.

With so many companies checking your credit, it is easy to accumulate credit inquiries. Your reports may even have inquiries that you did not authorize.  If you have a lot of credit inquiries, creditors will wonder just how much financing you REALLY need.  It will make some of them nervous enough not to extend your credit.  Or they may extend less than what they would have done if you didn’t have so many credit inquires

Learn how to dispute a credit inquiry by following these guidelines below:

Determine which inquiries are on your reports

Get your credit reports from the major credit bureaus and note all the inquiries. Remember, not all inquiries are from credit grantors. Some of them are promotional.

Search for addresses

If you get your reports from Experian, you can easily find creditor’s addresses. Reports from Equifax and Transunion do not contain this information. For whichever inquiries you can’t find an address for on Experian, you can always use Google to find their address.

Send a letter requesting their inquiry removal

Write a letter requesting that they remove their inquiries from your credit report.  Advise them that you didn’t authorize them to pull your credit. The Fair Credit Reporting Act maintains that your report should list authorized inquiries only.

Challenge the creditor’s proof of authorization

Most creditors will just remove themselves.  But some of them will fight you.  They will send proof that you authorized them to pull your credit. If that happens, go through the document you signed and read it carefully.  Some online lending portals will “shop” your loan request to various lenders.  A responsible broker will keep this number down to a minimum.  But I’ve seen some car loan lenders use a “shot gun” approach to finding financing for their clients. And in the fine print of the application you signed, you gave permission for them to do so.

Still, some credit grantors will be reluctant to remove inquiries from your credit report.  Again, write to your creditor and send the letter via Certified Mail Return Receipt Requested. Wait for 30 days and if you do not hear from them, take action by filing a complaint with the credit reporting agencies.

For most creditors, you won’t have much trouble removing their inquiry once you dispute it with the credit reporting agencies.  They won’t respond to the credit bureaus request for verification and it will automatically be deleted in 30 days.

But some will fight and you need to be prepared to fight back.  Remember, if you remove enough inquiries, you may raise your credit score. So, try your best to dispute unauthorized credit inquires.

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