@Anonymous wrote:
I am new to the forum! Can someone tell me what the shopping cart trick is please?
Here's a rough description; when you visit an online store that has a credit card provided by Comenity Bank, load your shopping cart with several items and go to the checkout page. If you have popup windows turned on and if you haven't chosen to "opt out" of prescreened offers, you may see a popup window appear saying something like, "Congratulations, you've been pre-approved for (name of store card)!" If you choose to accept the offer, you'll be taken to another page to fill in certain personal information. They'll ask you for (usually) the last four digits of your Social Security number. Enter all the information requested, and if the computer decides you meet the standards, you'll be approved for a new credit card with a soft pull of your credit report (which, unlike a hard pull, doesn't put a ding on your credit score).
The SCT is a highly useful way for people with low or iffy credit to get credit cards without having to risk reducing their credit scores through having their reports HP'ed, but it needs to be used sparingly. People often make the mistake of acquiring a lot of store cards this way, most of which they'll never actually use. This can come back to hurt them in a couple of ways; many banks that issue credit cards and other loans don't like to see a lot of retail cards on a prospective customer's profile because it's a possible indicator of someone who has a bad credit history who's trying to acquire a lot of credit the easy way; and Comenity itself is known to be an often-skittish lender that has a tendency to take AA's (adverse actions) of various sorts, up to and including closing all one's accounts, for sometimes-hard-to-figure-out reasons. That being said, we do know that obtaining too many Comenity-issued cards, with a total exposure that is very high, and trying too often to get credit-line increases on those cards (along with not managing those cards responsibly overall) can and will cause you to come to Comenity's negative notice.
