My wife and I attended an RV show back in mid January. We found a travel trailer we really liked and decided to buy it. With the trade in of our old travel trailer and our down payment, we were looking at financing about $25,000. Within a few days, I started getting reports from my credit monitoring service. After one week I had 9 hard inquiries with 7 denials and 2 returned for missing information on our application. My wife called the RV dealer and talked to their sales manager to find out what is going on, both my wife and I have excellent credit, both are well over 800. A bit later we got a call from their finance department asking if we were buying an $87,000 fifth wheel or the rig we wanted that was listed at about half that price. We found out that the wrong RV was attached to our credit app resulting in the problems obtaining financing.
With the correct rig attached to our application, we were quickly approved and now have our new trailer next to our house. But the past couple of days, both my wife and I have received letters from a variety of banks and credit unions telling us why we were denied credit. I expect all these denials will soon have a negative impact on our credit scores. When we were signing the paperwork for the trailer, I asked the finance guy at the dealer if anything could be done, he said those will come off our credit report in 30 days and all will be good. He brought up my credit score, it is already down over 60 points. Right now I am working on a letter to send to both the RV dealer and the banks and credit unions asking that the information be removed due to the incorrect application. Is there anything else I can do. I just think it is unfair that we take a hit on our credit due to incorrect information.
With our total surveillance society, people get shit upon routinely for dumb things they have no control over.
Did you see the article a few days ago (first published at WaPo I think) that ALL Apple employees who leave the company get their job title changed to “associate” in whatever databases keep that information. The result is that ALL ex-Apple employees, when looking for another job, can’t verify their former job title. All the sources that HR departments look at when trying to verify applicants’ prior positions see “associate” – typically the lowest-entry-level position at most companies.
I’m pretty sure the dealer is right. It will go away in 30 days. Is this unacceptable to you?
Heck, I accidentally sent my credit card payment to the wrong people making my payment late. If I remember correctly I don’t think it took more than a couple of months for my credit to get back to normal.
I don’t know about you, but this part of the OP has red flags being waved in my mind for identity theft. A “wrong RV application” for a higher amount negotiated? To me that sounds like someone fishing for some extra credit to splurge with, on someone else’s (your) dime.
I would lock down my credit reporting with “the big three” ASAP. I remember travelling back from overseas, using a flight bought on a government travel credit card. As soon as I got home from the airport, my then-wife got a call from Dell computers’ corporate office, asking if we’d requested $5k in credit on an account. We said “no,” and Dell said they would terminate the request. It rankled me pretty hard as far as how easy it was to set up a fake account with my personal info. Your OP sounds like a very similar situation to me…
Call it an “age” thing (I’ll be 70 in October) but this apple article is exactly why I don’t rely on electronics exclusively, I paper almost everything. A number of years ago I had a bank account completely disappear from my on line banking service. Logged, in, out, etc and it didn’t reappear. In those days you could phone the bank (maybe you still can, haven’t had to in a while) and it turned out all that was wrong was something in their “view” path. I had, however, kept paper copies of any transactions which proved I had the account. I don’t know if I would have had any problems had I not had that information but in any event, as I preach to my children and grands (who are so incredibly trusting of technology) keep hard copies.
If these apple employees had printed off any emails or letters confirming their then current job titles and/or descriptions that would go a long way in proving their claims should something like this happen in the future.
But this isn’t an argument for killing trees. Electronic pdfs of your bank statements don’t vanish if the bank website has a problem. If you organize and back up your electronic files sensibly, that’s a much more reliable and accessible record than paper.
To be sure, when you see any kind of documents (usually PDFs) on-line, you can usually download them to your own computer or to your own cloud storage and have them there too.
I’m definitely an old paper fogey too. (Donald and Rudy’s boxes of documents in their bedrooms ain’t got nuttin on me!) Gradually, little by little, I’m getting more of my stuff on-line, but I still keep paper docs of anything that I think is important.
I still always file my taxes on paper. I’d almost be willing to try filing my taxes electronically, except for:
(a) AIUI, there’s some rule that once you file electronically, you must do so forever after unto all eternity;
(b) I did try this once and it demanded I enter more detailed information than I would have to put on a paper return (detailed information about my 1099’s), and then after I was all done it said I had too many 1099s and I couldn’t file electronically. Thanks for waiting until I entered all my return information before telling me that.
That was my thought as well. An application for the wrong amount is one thing - people make mistakes. Or the dealer may have been hoping to do some major upselling: “Yes, this cute little thing is nice, but I bet you would really enjoy the bells and whistles in this other one! and look, you’re preapproved!!!”.
There should certainly NOT have been 9 hard inquiries.
Even if the 87K price was mistaken or an attempt to upsell, I’d treat the rest of it as attempted identity theft until proven otherwise.
Had an email from Experian this morning. It said they confirmed the incorrect inquiries and have correct both mine and my wife’s credit reports. They also reported this info to the other CR agencies. My credit score is now back well above 800 and the incorrect info is no where to be found on my credit history. It still aggravates me that the credit department of the RV dealer just blew me off when this issue was caused by their carelessness.
The problem was that there were a large number of “hard inquiries”, which did indeed affect the OP’s score. Those were bogus, and it looks like they’ve since been removed.