A debt collector has permissible purpose to pull your credit report, either hard or soft, without any express permission of the consumer.
FCRA 604.
Your issue is that you assert they do not have legitimate collection authority, and thus have no permissible purpose.
That requires some evidence that they no longer have active collection authority.
A call to a phone rep who was unable to locate your file may or may not be due to termination of their collection authority, but is not per se conclusive evidence of that assertion. You may simply have contacted an incompetent or lazy phone rep.
Or they may not now have the account, but did at the time they sent their inquriy to the CRA.
You need more evidence of the actual facts.
That single phone statement may not survive evidentary acceptance by the courts as legal proof of the issue.
