So a week or two ago I applied for a personal loan on lendingtree.com. They matched me up with a bank and I was alerted that there was a new inquiry on my credit report. Okay I expected that. I refused that loan for several reasons. Anyways, I just got another alert that the same bank pulled my report a second time. I called the company that sent the alert and they verified that my report was in fact pulled twice. I called lending tree and they said that’s not standard practice and that I should call that bank. I just called the bank and they pulled my file and told me that my report has only been pulled once, but they’ll put in a request to have one of them removed. I’m not quite sure that that means exactly. I’m going to guess that means they’ll call the CRA and ask if it was in fact pulled twice in which case they’ll have one removed. So my question is, if one of them isn’t removed should I dispute it. I don’t see why they would pull it twice. Actually, my first guess was that they were doing it just to piss me off. See they were supposed to get back to me within 24 hours, but it took them 10 days, several emails and a few phone calls. After all that, the interest rate they quoted me was rather insulting so I rejected the offer. But that doesn’t matter. Also, now that I think about it. Is there a set amount of times a specific lender is allowed to pull a report for one application? If I try to dispute it are they just going to tell me that since I applied for a loan, the bank is free to pull my report as many times as necessary? Normally it wouldn’t bother me, but if I’m in the market for a loan I don’t want unnecessary inquries on there, it’s going to lower my score and make it harder to get a loan with a decent rate (or at all).
Philster will probably be along eventually to confirm (or deny) this, but IIRC, when one is shopping around for a mortgage, the credit models are designed in a such a way that they anticipate multiple queries against your credit report and will thus group similar queries together as one inquiry. So, even if you shop around at 5 different banks, as long as they’re within a short timeframe and are all from mortgage lenders, the credit reporting companies aren’t going to ding your report for 5 inquiries, they’ll group them all as 1.
So, knowing that, I doubt it’s worth the hassle of harrassing LendingTree and trying to get them to admit that they did indeed pull your report twice and then filing disputes with the credit companies, etc. In this case, multiple inquiries shouldn’t affect your score.
Jadis is right; the FICO models take shopping around for credit into account, and will not penalize you for having a few credit pulls within a short period of time. If you are regularly applying for new credit on a constant basis, however, your score will decrease.
Bingo…shopping around won’t hurt you and multiple pulls from the same lender are easily ignored by scoring models.
Inquiries are temp ‘dings’ against a score…why: just in case that inquiry resulted in some new debt (unknown debt)…after a short time, the inquiry has no impact - if a loan was issued, it should show up on the report.
Appreciate the number of reasons for multiple pulls:
-purely accidental, genuine mistake
-
they didn’t key in some essential I.D the first time and wanted to make sure they had the full file
-
they didn’t key in some financial data, which is used in conjunction with the report to create a total scoring model upon pulling it
-they don’t mind paying the credit reporting agency again 
There’s an old quote that goes something like this: ‘Don’t attribute to malevolence what can be adequatly explained by mere incompetance.’
I think that applies here. Much more likely that the lender simply screwed up, and either didn’t get the full info the first time, or they just pulled it twice by accident. (And from your description, they don’t seem to be all that competant in general.)
t-bonham@scc.net, you are speculating and criticizing a company without knowing the facts. Reporting that one mistake makes them incompetent is not fighting ignorance, especially when we have established that the potential mistake was factually harmless.
The lendingtree.com site also says in their FAQ that all mortgage inquiries over a two week period will count as one request.
It is my belief that the bank had no good reason to pull your credit the second time.
I would note that pulling your credit file without permissible purpose is a violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).
I believe that
**§ 604. Permissible purposes of consumer reports [15 U.S.C. § 1681b] **
is the appropriate place to look for this law.
If you felt like going to small claims and found a sympathetic judge, actually you might be able to get a judgement against this bank.
In reality, I doubt a judge would have too much sympathy for you, since this is an honest mistake, but I think that does change your negotiating position if the bank fails to properly delete that inquiry.
But it was a personal loan and not a mortgage. With personal loans each inquiry is counted individually.
As for the bank, I don’t think that they’re incompetant. I belive it’s actually a huge banking/credit card/lending bank. I think they just dropped the ball on this one. The whole thing isn’t really a big deal. But if I get turned down for a loan BECAUSE of the extra inquiry I’ll dispute it, but I don’t think it’ll come to that.
Well I just checked my report again, and it appears that there is a THIRD inquiry from the same bank now. I guess I’ll call them back and see what they say.
These people are getting more and more suable…
I really don’t think I have a case for suing them (do I). All they would have to say is that I authorized them to pull my credit report and I didn’t limit it to one time. Besides, like I said, they are a big bank and I don’t think I’d have a chance. When I called they basically said that there was no record of my report being pulled three times etc, etc, etc. I think I may call back again in the morning during business hours and try explaining it to someone else. Otherwise I may dispute it, or I may not I’m not really sure yet.
You authorized them to pull your report for a transaction. The first pull is obviously with permissible purpose.
What argument could they use for the other two pulls? Are you in fact still pursuing the loan? I didn’t think you were, based on your original post.
They’re
A) violating your privacy and
B) probably decreasing your credit score.
The only good defense here for them would be “this is an accident”. But nonetheless, they’ve probably inflicted genuine harm by now… and I have had to pay for damages from a car wreck… even when it WAS an accident.
They don’t need 'authorization".
The need a permissable purpose, which is a bit more open ended.
So the two inquiries that happened AFTER I declined the loan would be wrong them. If we were still in negotiations, that might be one thing, but I flat out told her on the phone that I didn’t want it, and I declined it on the lending tree site. I would imagine that they should not have any access to my report after I refused the loan, thus ending negotiations. I’ll give the bank another call at some point today and then I’ll have to dispute it.
Ah, I didn’t notice it was for a personal loan. According the mortgage lender I spoke with last night each inquiry can take a point or two off your credit score. Not too bad really, but they have no cause for running your credit 3 times. What is to be gained?
Depending on your credit, pulling a single inquiry can have any negative effect from ZERO to THIRTY points. It’s crazy stuff. You’d see a 30 point hit more often with a REALLY HIGH score though, like an 800.