Just thought I would share a negative experience I had with Washington Mutual today. Over the past 6 weeks I have received 5 "pre-approved" offers from WaMu, 1 from Cabella's (a WaMu backed card), and 1 from ESPN (also a WaMu backed card). All of these cards indicated I was "pre-approved" for a Visa Platinum card. Now I've been around the boards here and elsewhere for a long time and know how this works with pre-approval, or at least I thought I did. I was declined for the card. I called to find out why and to try a recon, but no answer was provided and no recon granted. Current myfico.com scores are: TU: 593, EQ: 561, EX:602. Curretly have an Orchard Bank card (0 balance), CapOne (34% util), ExxonMobil (zero bal), JCPenney (29% util), and Texaco (0 balance). I'm actually kind of proud of those numbers. Up from 503 8 months ago and up from 483 2 years ago. I finally gave in and applied for the WaMu card due to the heavy marketing and after receving the 7th pre-approved letter I felt like they were really going to approve me. My whole point of this post is to share a bit of info the WaMu rep "Tiffany" passed on. She said the prescreening process used to generate "pre-approved" mailings doesn't necessarily mean they looked at your credit. She said from time to time, the marketing department will target geographic regions. She said for example they might drop a mailing to everyone in a large city (say Seattle). They will never have looked at any of the credit for these people, yet they still will receive a "pre-approved" offer. Another example she gave is that they might target everyone with a common last name. They might send a mailing to everyone with the last name "Johnson" and send them a "pre-approved" letter without ever having seen any credit data on them. I asked her how that made any sense when the terms and conditions on the back of the offer letter state that (and I'm quoting their offer) "Pre-Approved means you received this offer because a preliminary review of your *CREDIT* (emphasis mine) report from a consumer reporting agency showed that you met our credit requirements for a Visa Platinum Account." She stated that was not how the marketing department operated. She said the reason I received so many different mailing was due to the way they choose to market. She said in the examples above, if my last name was "Johnson" and I lived in Seattle, I would in fact receive 2 mailing from their different campaigns. She said I just must have matched they keywords on their campaign lists. She said pre-approved means you simply met the prescreening criteria and in this case the criteria may have been as simple as a common name. Anyway, wanted to share. Seems underhanded and misleading. I always had the impression that pre-approved meant that they knew at least my score or income or something and that I may have fallen into a certain group with characteristics that made my approval likely. It seems instead I'm just being carpetbombed by WaMu in an attempt to gain marketshare. I feel a little silly for falling for it and for taking the inquiry ding on my CBR now! I'll definitely not do any business with them as my credit gets better. Chris
