Credit Repair Help from the great downloadable E-Book entitled "Give yourself Credit"
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Removing Inquiries
Removing inquiries is quite time consuming and is not as nearly as important as removing your late payments, charge off’s, and other negative credit accounts. If you have good credit, it is unlikely that inquiries will cause you to be denied credit. Everyone has some credit inquiries so don’t be too concerned unless you have many of them (over twenty on each report) or if your inquiries are recent (in the last six months). However, if your credit is mostly good and you want to raise your credit scores a bit, removing some inquiries can help.

When you apply for credit, the lender will electronically pull up a copy of your credit report to determine whether or not they want to extend credit to you. Inquiries are the notations that appear at the end of your credit reports as a result of a lender checking your credit report. These notations will indicate the date that the creditor requested your credit report as well as the name of the creditor.

There are two types of inquiries: those that represent the times that you have applied for credit and those that show the companies to which the credit bureaus have sold your information. If the bureaus allow a company to review your demographic and other non-credit related information, they will indicate this in a separate section of inquiries as a courtesy to you. These types of inquiries do not adversely affect you since they do not appear on the credit report that a lender sees. The only inquiries that you need to worry about are the ones, which were created as a result of your applying for credit. These two types of inquiries are usually listed separately on your credit reports so that you can more easily tell the difference between them.

Unfortunately, the credit bureaus typically refuse to investigate disputed inquiries as they feel that it is not their duty to do so under the F.C.R.A. At the time that this document was written, the only effective method that the author has found to remove inquiries is to contact the companies, which reviewed your credit report. Unfortunately, this is a rather involved process, which requires several steps:

Step 1 - Identify the Creditors
Before you can dispute your inquiries you need to know who to contact. Depending on the type of credit report that you are looking at this may be very easy or very difficult. Equifax, for example, may only list the name of the creditor (or some obscure acronym which is not helpful) and the date of the inquiry whereas Experian typically lists all of this as well as the address of the creditor. Purchasing a 3-in-1 report from an online source is probably your best bet since they tend to give you the most information regarding the creditors in the inquiry section.

In order to proceed, you will need to know the name and phone number of each of the creditors whose inquiry you want removed. If your credit report does not show a phone number, you can use the address to obtain the phone number from directory assistance. If your credit report does not show an address, you will need to order a more detailed report (see the above link) or look on one of your other reports (such as Experian which usually has addresses) to see if it contains the same inquiry.

On a side note, since the premise of your dispute letter is that you do not recall giving authorization to the creditor to check your credit, it does not make much sense to dispute inquiries with creditors with whom you have an active account. After all, how could you not remember applying for credit if you have an account? Focus your efforts on the inquiries, which represent companies that have not given you an account.

Step 2 – Call Each Creditor

Now that you have a phone number for each inquiry, you need to call each creditor in preparation for sending them a dispute letter. When you call, try to locate the appropriate department that has the ability to remove information from your credit report. Some times a creditor will try to convince you that you need to take this issue up with the credit bureaus. They are either lying or are ignorant so do not give up. Once you have located this department, inform them that you need to send them a letter and get their address or fax number.

Step 3 – Send Dispute Letter

Now you are ready to compose your dispute letter. Use the letter template in the credit direct letter appendices section.

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