@Anonymous wrote:
What do you mean when you say you opted out? As far as I know, opting out just means you won't get pre-screened offers of credit. It doesn't prevent people from checking your credit. As far as I know, CAs can only do soft credit pulls so it shouldn't show on your credit report when a company pulls it.
I think if you want to prevent them from checking, you need to put a freeze on it, which isn't free.
CAs can and do pull hard inquiries, even while opted out and even with a freeze in place, or at least as reported by others in here. I never froze a report, but I sure had my share of hard and soft pulls back in the day, even while opted out.
Everyone is automatically opted in. When you are opted in, companies like insurers, CC issuers, and investment firms will subscribe to and have generalized access to your CR via soft inquiries. These are harmless and come as a soft pull via PRM inquiries and so on. However, a more sinister aspect are CAs. CAs also can subscribe to your CR. There usually isn't a soft pull anywhere, but they will have access to changes to your CR. As they get alerted to those changes on your CR (e.g. lowered debt, added inquiries) while opted in, the CRA will alert the CA to key changes.
If you take a stroll in the Mortgage Loans board, you'll see many, many examples of folks applying for a mortgage only to have a CA appear at the last second. This is due to being opted in. Many CAs will decide to report once they see a mortgage inquiry appear. They know that your lender will likely require you to pay the debt as a condition to approval. When you opt out, you lose out on the preapproval offers and the opportunity to receive more junk mail, but you'll also prevent the CA from seeing those major changes like a mortgage inquiry. Opting out doesn't prevent a CA from reporting or placing inquiries to see your report, but opting out will stop the decidion making process by a CA by eliminating the flow of information by which to make a decision to report.
