How to Remove Credit Inquiries From My Report
Credit inquiries comprise a small but important part of your credit report and, therefore, your credit score. Soft inquiries occur when you, a landlord, or an existing creditor check your credit. These do not count against your score. However, hard inquiries, which occur when you try to open a new line of credit, do drop your score. Creditors feel that hard inquiries indicate that you need money, which may indicate financial trouble. Fortunately, you can get hard inquiries off your report if they are there for illegitimate reasons.
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Instructions
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Access your credit report from all three credit reporting bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion) and flip to the section on inquiries in all three reports. You need to look at all your reports in case some inquiries were reported to only one bureau.
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Make sure that all of the inquiries on your report were either initiated by you or in response to your request to open a new line of credit. If you have inquiries on your credit report that you don't know about, they can drop your score so you should try to have them removed.
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Find the addresses of the creditors who have accessed your credit report. You cannot dispute an inquiry with a credit bureau; you have to take it up with the person or company who accessed your report. Your Experian report will provide the addresses of all creditors who made inquiries, but TransUnion and Equifax will not, so you may have to find contact information for creditors appearing only on those reports by yourself.
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Write a polite letter to each creditor asking those in charge to remove the inquiry. By law, the creditor must either prove that you authorized the inquiry (by applying for credit) or remove the inquiry from your report. Sometimes, the creditor will provide you with proof; other times, the creditor may simply remove the inquiry. You should only use this process to remove a credit inquiry if you did not authorize it.
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Follow up and make sure that the creditor actually removes the inquiry. You don't want to have gone through all of this only to still have an inquiry unnecessarily dragging down your credit score.
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References
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