Capital One Offer-On Opt-out list!

[Anonymous]

I put my name on the Permanent Opt Out List about 2 years ago.  It has provided a great relief; almost no offers fill my postal mailbox any more.  One conspicuous exception has continued:

                               Capital One.

I am going to use their site and opt-out and I hope it works.  However, I already find them extremely obnoxious in two ways.

1. They are the only ones who still appear to be sending.  How do they get away with it?  I think they should be reported for violations and punished in some monetary way, if they really are trying to get around the rules somehow.  To my knowledge, I don't have a "relationship" with them.
   
   
2. I have read some of their offers, enough to know that their advertising is itself quite deceptive.  Consumers should definitely be wary of their offers.

[Anonymous]

Okay, in order to try the direct approach, I went to Capital One's site and looked for an opt-out contact.  They listed:

                                           If you need assistance and would like to speak to a Capital One®representative,

                                           please call toll-free 1-866-381-0454.

Since I did not have an account with them, I had to fail multiple times to give my account number to the robot answering system.  Perhaps it helped when I said "customer service representative".  Anyway, I then got a live person to help.  She was very polite, and was apparently able to honor my request to get off of their postal mailing list.  We'll see if it worked.  She said it could take up to 30 days for all offers to cease.

[RobertEG]

Opting out does not prevent creditors from making unsolicited offers for credit.

What it prevents is their obtaining any listing of consumers from a CRA that is obtained via submission of criteria to a CRA, and screening of consumer files to produce a listing of consumers who meet those criteria. 

Do the offers make any reference to haing obtained your name from a listing provided by the CRAs?

If a creditor sends an offer that was not based on having obtained your name from a CRA listing, it is not covered by the opt out provisions.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your info, RobertEG.  No, the offers do not appear to say why I am on their mailing list.  What you are saying leads me to believe that the opt-out list just affects the behavior of the CRAs, rather than affecting the behavior of the credit card solicitors more directly, which is what consumers like myself would have wished for.

As an update, I got an offer in the mail from Capital One today.  The post office did not do me the favor of postmarking it, and there is no date on the offer, but I would have to guess it was probably mailed about a week ago, so approximately Oct 30, 2014.

[RobertEG]

Many creditors dont want to waste time and $ with sending out unsolicited offers to just anyone, and use the CRA to pre-screen, thus providing them with a lisitng of only consumers who will likely meet their qualirication criteria.  So if you have opted out, you probably wont hear from most of the major creditors.

If a creditor gets your name from a source other than a CRA, they can send offers that are not regulated under the FCRA.

[Anonymous]

Well, it looks like it took a couple of weeks to take effect, but by all appearances, Capital One has honored my request, and the offers have now stopped coming.  Yay!