Pre-Approved letters

Because sooner are later you'll get a card.Also their laughing like hell when you apply.*had there hopes up lets bring him down*lol

 

There's always that good old fashioned fine print and clever wording. "YOU ARE PRE-APPROVED!!!* * - based on a preliminary review of your credit. You are GUARANTEED APPROVAL NO MATTER WHAT as long as you meet our additional criteria."

Then there are the ones that say "You have been pre-selected to apply for our ZERO-INTEREST ZERO-FEE PLATINUM CARD WITH A MINIMUM $50,000 LIMIT!". I like the auto financing ones that say "WE GUARANTEE WE WILL ACCEPT YOUR APPLICATION OR WE WILL PAY YOU $10,000 CASH!" Sure they'll accept your application; doesn't mean they'll APPROVE it.

Just make sure you always send back that "Business Reply Mail" envelope. Stuff it with aluminum foil and as much trash as you can cram in there. They have to pay return postage no matter what.

 

I used to use those letters to send mail in i just white out their address until they changed it.Or better yet send a letter explaining why you have to decline their offer,because of their recent drop of their stock,and you don't want to get stuck with a dead beat company.

 

It was only a few years ago that some law was passed requiring that the "Business Reply Mail" envelopes must be left in-tact. Up until then, you could cut out the label, attach it to a stack of tires, and they'd have to pick up shipping costs.

Wish I'd thought of that before the laws changed!

 

CC outfits probably get CRAs to furnish them a list of consumers exceeding a certain credit score. Once they do then the cc outfits send out these pre-approval forms by the truck/plane load, figuring that most will end up in shredders and fireplaces. And those actually applying will then be taken a closer look at, and decide who is "worthy".

 

I don't think it's quite that scientific.

Because the scores are valuable (i.e. costly) commodities, I'd bet they just get a list of people who meet certain arbitrary criteria that may or may not correlate to actual FICO scores. Something like: People who work at some company or group of companies (e.g. hospitals, banks, or some other way to easily guesstimate demographics), people with X department store cards, people with X mortgage. I doubt they spend very much on data or filtering because more data costs more $$$ and more filtering is more work which means more $$$.

So they get a list, send out a zillion letters and then do credit checks and FICO scores (i.e. "hard" pulls) to determine eligibility on only the responses. To do a hard pull, they need: a) your permission and b) to spend money so they aren't going to do this for the millions of people they send the letters to because: a) that would be illegal - no permissible purpose and b) expensive.

I doubt they are sending you these letters just to harass you. The fact is that there is SO MUCH money to be made (even still) in these cards that it's worth it to send a few (million) to some people who won't qualify just to snag the ones that do.

 

From what I understood, the CRAs themselves are behind this. Since consumer information, especially credit information, is so profitable, is anyone surprised?

It was explained to me that the CRAs sell lists of customers who fall into certain categories. The business doesn't actually get the FICO or actual credit history, but they get a list of subscribers who "recently paid off a car loan and have no delinquencies in the past 18 months" or who "have a poor overall history but have 12 months of no delinquencies" or who "have over $10,000 in reported debt", etc.