If you want to prevent random soft pulls from companies you don't recognize or companies you don't get services through you need to do a pre-screen opt out: https://www.optoutprescreen.com
The credit bureaus happily sell your info to companies wanting to sell you something and/or see if you qualify for credit offerings, opt out prevents them form doing that. But if you do opt out you can't get any offers from credit card pre-qual sites as they can't access your credit report.
I did an opt out for over a year, I was carrying some sizable credit card balances, all 0% balance transfers or 0% intro, and was getting a ton of personal loan offers in the mail. I had not interest in getting a 15% or more loan to pay off 0% balances ahead of time and for which I had the funds in savings accounts to payoff before the 0% ended. Besides being annoying most of them had pre-qual codes on them so I had to shred them instead of just tossing in the trash with other junk mail. I decided to opt back in a month or so ago and haven't gotten any loan offers year, so maybe they figured out I wasn't interested.
I dont' know if freezing your credit reports does the same thing as opt-out, I know locking doesn't as I had all my reports locked when I was getting the loan offers.
