Why Not Dispute Inquiries on a Credit Report?
When I was first looking to buy my home, I figured I would need to squeeze every possible point out of my credit score in order to qualify. In late 2010, I failed at getting a car loan. I had 30+ inquiries spread out over all three credit reporting agencies and thought of the brilliant idea to dispute inquiries and send good will letters to try to clean that up.
That was a huge mistake.
What ended up happening was fraud alerts were continually placed on my file, as the creditors I applied with took my requests to mean I didn’t actually apply. While they didn’t remove the inquiry, they let the credit reporting agencies know I contacted to dispute inquiries and claimed they were not mine. The reporting agencies in turn placed a fraud alert on my file.
While this isn’t a huge deal, it did take a lot of effort to remove each one. This is why I recommend to never try to good will or dispute inquiries. No only could be a ton of work if it all goes wrong, but the benefit you get from removing inquiries is minimal. If you truly have inquiries that do not belong to you, the advisable steps to take would be to file a police report for the identity theft and forward this to the credit reporting agencies.
Points to consider:
- Inquiry damage is highly over-rated in regards to FICO scoring. Why dispute inquiries?
- If the inquiry is not yours, file a police report.
- Multiple inquiries for the same credit search (ie mortgage) count as one inquiry.
- The amount of time taking care of the fraud alerts could be used elsewhere in repair.