But this can get the entity pulling credit for "account review" in trouble if they have no business with you. A soft pull still releases some of your personal information. A freeze is a freeze. It stops all activity for anyone without permission. And that is permission you must personally approve. You can not freeze any creditor you currently have an account with, only those fishing for information. I have had mine frozen for a long time and renew them as required. Any pre-approved offer I may receive from someone I have never had business with before is usually met with a pretty strongly worded letter. Sometimes it goes farther. Never know.
You never see much activity for FCRA on this because a majority of the folks have no idea they can do this.
Thank you all for your input so far...but excelsior, outta, kevin, and any others...if you'd be willing, would you please clarify your posts for me so I know what I'm doing as I go forward.
My understanding was that if one were to freeze their Lexis file, it would make verifying certain tradelines on the big 3 reports potentially a more difficult task, and you'd likely net more CRA deletions if you froze your Lexis file. I think the strategy relies on the theory that the big 3 CRA's, when evaluating a dispute, often just verify 2-3 items associate w/the tradeline...and if the address and/or phone # associated w/the account matches up, it simply gets verified. The idea being that if you remove some of the potential verification options...such as phone #, and/or old addresses...via freezing your info w/one of the biggest aggregators (Lexis), you take away one of their major mechanisms to verify. This would obviously be done at the CRA level as well...but it's been suggested that you should really additionally freeze your Lexis file to remove a significant verification option for them.
The suggestions about pursuing those that potentially pull after you've frozen your Lexis is where I'm getting a little hung up. Do you mean those that have pulled my Lexis file, those that have pulled one of my big-3 files (presuming I froze them as well), or what were you meaning here? Also, are you referring to promotional (soft) pulls, or ?
And yeah...I realize that doing all of this will likely make the process of applying for credit in the future more burdensome. While I'm not (yet) a full-blown paranoid privacy nut, I'd kind of prefer to shrink my (semi) public profile. I'm willing to put up w/the hassles that go along w/this.
And a big ongoing thank you for your continuing help w/my education in all of this.