@seattletravels wrote:
SP are only visible to you when pulling your credit report. However, companies certainly have their own internal tracking and scoring algorithms based on your behaviors with them which would probably include prequal data.
Interesting. So if multiple credit card apps with all the hard pulls in a short time (i.e., over 12 months) indicates greater credit-seeking risk, I wonder what an issuer like Amex (since that's the issuer at the core of this thread) thinks when they pull up someone's account and see that the person has been coming to the Amex site and clicking the "Check for Pre-Qualified Offers" link every week or so, or that they're clicking "Apply Now" on a few cards every so often to see if they get the 'pre-approved' message, or the dreaded 'Expanding your relationship with us' groin kick of false hope. Might the multiple inquiries on the website so often possibly be seen as suspect credit-shopping behavior?
This is not me asking for a friend (ha), I was certainly guilty of this a few months ago before I started educating myself by reading these boards. I've been doing a relatively uneducated but still fairly productive rebuild for a couple of years and, on a whim back in the fall after seeing a YouTube video about the best travel cards, I checked the Amex website and saw that I was pre-approved for an Amex Platinum. Pulled the trigger, instantly approved, couldn't believe it. Like so many others who don't necessarily know what they're doing, I thought, "Wheeeee! Credit cards! I can get credit cards now!!" and wanted the big miles/points SUBs because of some increased travel I have coming up over the next 12-18 months. Having learned about the pre-qual things offered by most issuers, I started checking them all out about twice a week just to see what else was available. Yeah, I know. Anyway, I also got a Cap One Venture (also pre-qualified) within two days of my Amex Platinum approval and something inside me told me to quit. Then I found these boards...in time, thankfully.
I am absolutely impressed by both the knowledge and the overall pleasant and encouraging demeanor among the cognoscenti of this forum -- seriously, I've never seen its equal on any message board, ever -- but I think there are a lot of folks like me who think that frequent checks of credit card websites for pre-qualified offers (or, in Amex's case, doing the 'Apply Now' trick) is basically harmless, and I wonder if that really is the case, or if it could be something each website is counting against you if you do it too much.
