A hard inquiry appears when a lender pulls your credit for an application. If you didn’t apply or authorize it, you can dispute it — an inquiry without a permissible purpose shouldn’t be there. (Hard inquiries you did authorize are accurate and generally can’t be removed; they age off in about two years and affect scores only slightly.)
Before you write
List the inquiries you don’t recognize: the company name and date exactly as shown. Note that some inquiries come from a different brand name than you’d expect (a bank’s lending arm, a dealer’s financing partner) — make sure it’s truly unauthorized before disputing.
The letter
[Your full name]
[Your current address]
[City, State ZIP]
[Date of birth] [Last 4 of SSN]
[Date]
[Equifax / Experian / TransUnion - address]
Re: Dispute of unauthorized credit inquiry
[Confirmation number, if any]
To whom it may concern:
The following hard inquiry/inquiries appear on my credit report. I did not apply
for credit with, or authorize a credit pull by, these companies, and I am not
aware of any permissible purpose for them:
1. [Company name as shown] - inquiry dated [date]
2. [Company name] - inquiry dated [date]
Please investigate whether these inquiries were made with a permissible purpose.
If they were not authorized by me and lack a permissible purpose, please remove
them and send me an updated report. If you have evidence that I authorized any of
them, please provide it.
Sincerely,
[Your signature]
[Your printed name]
How to send it
Send to the bureau (certified, keep a copy). It often helps to also contact the company that pulled your credit and ask them to remove an inquiry they can’t tie to an application by you. A cluster of unauthorized inquiries can be a sign of identity theft — if so, see the identity-theft block and fraud alert / freeze.
Notes. Don’t dispute legitimate inquiries from applications you actually made — that’s frivolous and pointless (they fall off on their own). Rate-shopping for a mortgage/auto/student loan within a short window is usually counted as a single inquiry by scoring models, so those rarely need disputing. General information, not legal advice.