I see the opt-out thing being mentioned frequently, but what is it's value as related to credit repair?
Probably nothing, unless thieves are stealing your mail. If you are getting credit offers, you can use them to compare and track your progress.
That's what I thought, but some people on the credit repair boards seem to act like it's a essential, first step. I'm only a newbie, but I couldn't see any real value to it. I also was looking at it like you - where the number of offers helps act as a measure of progress... Thanks for the reply!
Some people believe that opting out somehow prevents CAs from finding you. Since it only blocks promotional inquiries, which are usually created by companies buying lists of consumers that meet some credit criteria, I don't see how this would be any advantage. Legally, under FCRA, promotional inquiries can only be pulled by companies that are offering "firm offers of credit". There have even been lawsuit settlements when they were used instead to generate sales leads, as when an auto dealer bought promotional inquiry credit report information to use to solicit consumers for selling cars, using a bogus "offer of credit" with no material value to justify the permissible purpose. Although a CA might try to obtain information by such inquiries, it doesn't include full credit reports, and if they already had permissible purpose to pull a consumer's report, due to an assigned or bought collection account, they could just pull the full report. Several of the CRAs sell services that notify CAs when certain types of activity, such as inquiries, new accounts, or new addresses, appear on a specific consumer's report. This is basically used for skip-tracing. Presumably, the CA already has permissible purpose to pull that report, anyway. I believe I saw an old FTC opinion letter, sent to a CA, where the CA wanted to know if they had permissible purpose to pull consumer reports, if they used reported bad debts to approach the creditor and offer to collect on it, basically just fishing for business. FTC said NO, since at the time of the inquiry, the CA was not collecting any debt from the consumer whose report they were pulling. There are some businesses that recently have been buying lists from the CRAs of consumers that have had recent mortgage inquiries, in order to sell these lists as leads to other mortgage lenders when a consumer has applied to a mortgage. It is not clear whether these are being properly reported to the consumers as promotional inquiries. There could be a potential for abuse if, for example, a CA used a list of consumers with recent mortgage inquiries to dunn and post bad debt accounts in bad faith, knowing that most consumers closing on a mortgage would have little choice but to pay even debts they don't owe in order to close on a mortgage with no time to dispute.
