Incestuous World of Personal Finance and Credit Repair

[Anonymous]

Has anyone else done any research or digging into who owns which companies and how they're all inter-related?  I am just naturally curious about bias when taking the advice of a website and have a background in research, so I poke around to make sure that what I'm getting is upfront.  There are a lot of shady people on the internet.

I routinely go through all the inquiries on my report, and not just the ones that other people can see.  The real story lies in the ones that are shown only to you.  The details behind the sites and companies that we throw around so casually and rely on to a great deal is mind-blowing once you start to unravel all the layers.

Anyone else?

[marty56]

IMHO It would probably make a good X Files episode.  I wonder what Scully and Mulder's FICO score was.

[RobertEG]

FCRA 604 defines the conditions upon which a party can obtain your credit report, regardless of whether it is a so-called hard inquiry or soft inquiry (i.e., can be shown in credit reports provided to anyone, or only to the named consumer).

If not based on a request for credit or insurance inititiated by the consumer or based on a business transaction initiated by the consumer, a party is expressly prohibited from obtaining your credit report.  See FCRA 604(c).

While an existing creditor has permissible purpose under FCRA 604(a)(3)(F) to pull a consumer's report to review an existing account with the named consumer, that permissible purpose does not extend to other companies that may be interrelated in some corporate fashion, but are not the actual creditor.  I am not aware of any prevalent and actual issue with companies that are not the named creditor requesting and obtaining consumer credit reports based only on some corporate tie. 

Have you actually seen an inquiry by a party who is not the named creditor?

[Anonymous]

I spent a good two hours one night going through all the soft pulls on all three reports

Most of them I tracked back to where they came from (creditwise from cap one, credit karma, etc, all the credit tracking sites i subscribe to)

But a few I could not pin down.  I did notice that one of them was for an old collection agency that has gone belly up in the last year.  That one made me laugh, considering not two weeks after their inquiry I had disputed the debt knowing they were closed down and it was removed instantly from all three reports.

Then there are the obvious dataminers for the advertisers.  One in particular really irritates me, but they pull quarterly.   If youre in with ANY of the vantage providers commonly used, you probably have had a visit or two by this third party.

But yeah most of them are for preapprovals or account reviews and the like on existing products I have or may be offered. 

There are almost 100 of them though this last 12 months

[AverageJoesCredit]

Ill hand it to you CreditGame, you have a flair with your titles

[longtimelurker]

Of course in these days of EQ hack, permissible or even fraudulent pulls of the credit report aren't the real danger!

[Anonymous]

The one that I find the most interesting is MicroBilt and not only that they are doing soft inquiries into my report but that they are doing dozens of them, all from  differently phrased version of MicroBilt, including MICROBILT TEST ACCT FOR MIKE DICACCIO and MICROBUILT and MICROBILTT and what not.  Is that something that I should really raise red flags about?

[Anonymous]

You mean the title I came up with?