In April, I applied for and was approved for a Bank of America Premium Rewards card. On that date, Bank of America made not one, but two, identical hard inquiries to TransUnion. When I discovered the duplicate hard inquiry, I attempted to resolve with BoA. They responded in writing that the one inquiry was correct and the matter was closed. They did not acknowledge or address the excessive inquiry made on the same date.
In follow-up calls to BoA, they refused to acknowledge their error and would not discuss further. I offered to send them a screen shot of my actual credit report from TransUnion showing it (or they could have done a soft pull themselves) but they didn’t want to confuse their position on the matter with facts.
TransUnion confirmed that there were duplicate inquiries but said that inquiries are “statements of fact” and they could not do anything about it unless requested by BoA. Further, they said that there is no procedure or provision within the law to dispute inquiries.
I went on to file complaints through CFPB against BoA and TransUnion. TransUnion posted canned verbiage about what an inquiry was, not mentioning the duplicate, and closed the complaint. BoA said *their" records showed only one pull, and said the duplicate must be a TransUnion problem. I asked them to very simply give me a statement that said only one BoA inquiry on that date was valid, and if there was another one being reported, it should be removed. TransUnion had indicated that would be all they needed. But BoA refused to provide even that because, again they said, “there was only one inquiry made.”
It doesn’t appear to me that CFPB does much good … the bank/bureau has complete judgement on the validity of the complaint, and there is no appeal process.
Now you may say that hard pulls don’t matter for much in the FICO score, and that is true. But issuers of rewards card put heavy weight on AAoA and recent hard inquiries for credit cards beyond the FICO score. Also, you may understand that duplicate inquiries for the same type of credit within a time period count as one, but 1) that’s only true for mortgage/auto loans, and 2) previous point about rewards card’s looking separately at inquiries.
Not much of a question here other than ideas for escalating or fixing, but I don’t believe there is.