There are numerous different permissible purposes for a party to pull your credit report.
They are all set forth in detail under FCRA 604.
Credit report freezes and fraud alerts generally do not impose restrictions on credit inquiries that are permissible as an internal account review by your existing creditors of by a debt collector. They generally apply to any inquiries that are for the stated permissible purpose of a consumer initiated business transaction of a consumer initiated request for new or extended credit. Before any new business or creditor can normally obtain a credit report, you must be contacted if a fraud alert, of remove the freeze for that inquiry.
Whether or not the inquiry is coded as soft or hard is a totally different issue.
Any consumer initated request for new credit can normally be coded as hard, and the coding as soft is discretionary on the part of the creditor.
CRA policy clearly provides a separate inquiry code for internal account reviews, and if coded as such, they are automatically treated as soft inquiries, and are not shown by the CRAs in credit reports made available to parties other than the named consumer.
If a party makes an inquiry that lacks permissible purpose or is prevented by a fraud alert of freeze from being filled, no, it will not show as an inquiry. Inquiries only show in your report if your report is actually provided to the inquiree.
If filling of any inquiry is denied, the toothpaste is still in the tube, and no record of CRA sending of a report is entered into your file.
