There are different types of promotional offers for credit, and differing ways that a potential creditor can get your name/address and make such offers. You can receive offers that were not based on obtaining your name from a soft pull with a CRA.
Any creditor who can obtain consumer names and contact addresses are free to make unsolicited offers for their products.
They might, for example, simply use public record listings of names and addresses, or purchase lists from vendors, such as those who gather info from their internet sites, to send offers.
However, just sending out offers based on general listings can be very costly and minimally productive, as many will not meet minimum qualification requirements. The FCRA provides a mechanism to get more refined listings, and only solicitations mailed based on those listings are a result of soft pulls.
In order to provide potential creditors with more refined and thus productive listings, the FCRA offers a special service. Creditors can send a CRA a specific statement of screening criteria, and have the CRA run those criteria against all consumer credit files, providing a listing of only specific consumers whose credit histories meet the specified criteria. Those inquiries are the so-called promotional inquires provided for under FCRA 604(c). They, however, do not obtain any account specfic information, and only get names and addresses.
They must hope that the consumer nibbles on the offer and initiates a request for the offered credit.
A consumer can notify a CRA that they wish to be excluded from any such listings provided by that CRA.
However, opting out does not prevent creditors who obtain your name from other sources from still sending offers.
