With a creative arguement in front of the right judge on the right day, you could probably win a battle in court over it since it is not spelled out perfectly in the FCRA, but you would probably have your work cut out for you.
I used a CA hard pull as ammo in a court case once where a CA took me to court and won a judgment for a debt after they claimed they had exhausted every effort to contact me. I appealed after they gave the phone number they had tried to use to contact me and it was a very old number but they claimed they did not have an accurate phone number for me. I informed them that I noticed that they did a hard pull on my credit report about a year prior to this. I also informed them that the only chance they had to claim they had a permissible purpose was if they pulled it to get information to assist them in collecting the debt. Since my CURRENT address AND phone number were on all of my reports, I argued that they pulled my credit without using any of the information to collect on the debt and therefore actually had no permissible purpose--either that, or they INTENTIONALLY used old contact info to try getting a hold of me so they could claim in court that they tried everything in their power to get a hold of me before going to court. They ended up dismissing the judgment with prejudice and I never heard from them again.
That being said, I don't think it would be worth trying to take the CA to court or anything because you would have a tough time winning, but it could be something you could use against them in the right circumstances and enough creativity.
