I am an international student in NY and had received my SSN 2 weeks back. I had applied for a BoFA Travel rewards card for students through my BoFA bank branch and I was denied the card. I have a checking account with them for over 9 months now. I received my denial letter today and the reasons given for the denial are
1. Invalid SSN
2. Lack of sufficient History at this address
3. Lack of history at this phone
4. Insufficient History.
While the last three reasons are acceptable, I just don't understand the first one, invalid SSN.
I did login to Experian website as suggested in the BoFA denial letter for a free report and this is what I got:
"The issue date of the Social Security number that you gave us when you contacted us is not verified by the Social Security Administration.
This address has pertained to a business: My address, NJ, 073**.
Inquiry current address was reported within the last 90 days.
PRINTING-PUBLISHING COMPANY: My Address, NJ, 073**."
As soon as BoFA denied me the card, I applied to Discover for a student card and I had to upload a copy of my SSN, school documents and stuff and I was approved the same day over the phone for a CL of $500. I received my Discover card with a L2C credit score which reads 712.
So it looks like discover didn't have a problem with my SSN but BoFA did have trouble verifying it.
Also I went to Chase's website and also BoFA's for prequalifed offers. I got this message from Chase -
"We are unable to locate any special credit card offers for you at this time. This may be because you have opted out of "pre-screened" offers from Chase and other companies". Well I haven't opted out of prescreened offers yet.
I had similar issues of my SSN not being verified by Google Wallet and I had to send a copy of my SSN card before they could manually verify it.
My question now is what does Experian mean by their comment? Has anyone else had this issue before? On calling BoFA they wouldn't recon and they say that my denial was mainly because of this technicality.
I called Experian and I was told that SSA no longer reports the issue date of new SSNs for a few years now but just mentions the same on the card.
Kindly let me know if there is anything that I should do to rectify this or is this all just because my SSN is fresh? Will this issue be settled once Discover starts reporting to the credit bureaus?
Your thoughts are appreciated.
