The FCRA is structured to avoid the need for creditors and insurors to obtain express permission from a consumer to pull your credit report.
It does so by providing a comprehensive list of situations that give arise to permissible purpose. Those are all set forth in FCRA 604.
if a party has permissible purpose as defined under any one or more of the provisions of section 604, no authroization/permission is requred from the consumer.
The so-called promotional inquiry provisions of section 604(c) relates to a specific type of inquiry wherein a creditor or insuror can obtain a "report" that is limited to a listing of consumers that meet certain specific criteria. Creditors can submit a set or criteria and have the CRAs run them against their files and produce a listing of name and addresses of consumers who meet the submitted criteria. That enables the creditors to restrict their offers for credit to only those likely to qualify. In exchange for that service from the CRA, the creditor must make a firm offer to each person on the received listing.
The listing provided to the creditor cannot contain any account-specific information, and record of the inquiry cannot be posted in credit reports made available to others.
It is thus the ONLY type of inquiry that is required to be "soft" under the FCRA.
The process of opting-out permits a conssumer to submit a request to the CRA that their name be excluded from any such listings produced by the CRA.
Nothing more.
It does NOT restrict any party who has any other permissible purpose from obtaining the consumer's credit report.
Debt collectors have express permissible purpose under FCRA 604, and thus can still obtain full consumer credit reports regardless of whether the consumer has opted-out. Whether their inquiries are coded as so-called hard or soft is not regulated under the FCRA.
A party who obtains a consumer credit report is explicitly prohibited from using the report for any reason other than their specific, stated permissible purpose.
It would be illegal for a debt collector to obtain a consumer's credit report for their stated purpose of furthering collection on a debt, and then sell or disclose the contents of that report to others.
