In trying to bump off the inquiries on my second AOR it got me to thinking that we do not really have a good centralized thread on bumping and results that was mathematically focused. I see a lot of threads that are vague but not any that are exact.



The quick definition of bumping is pulling your credit report on Equifax and trans union through a reporting service to have the hard inquiries fall off.



On my first AOR (8/17/07) I used:

National City Identity Protect: $8.95/mo (24 hour pulls)

Privacy Matters 123:$29/yr (24 hour pulls)

TrueCredit: $14.99/mo (24 hour pulls)



I did not have an exact amount of pulls before the falls but it took about 2 months to see results. It seemed to work like clockwork at what people had posted with about 60 pulls for transunion and 90 pulls for Equifax. All of my pulls were done through a transunion based service. I just pulled like a mad man until the inquiries fell off not really keeping track of exact numbers.



On my second AOR (10/17/07) I used (am using):

National City Identity Protect: $8.95/mo (24 hour pulls)

Equifax Gold: free because of stolen corporate data (24 hour pulls, you can see the soft pulls but the service does not add a soft pull)

American Express Credit Secure (Experian based): $11.99/mo (24 hour pulls after 30 day free trial)



I have just started to see bumpage on my Equifax report (not transunion just Equifax more on that later), from the Equifax Gold service I can see the following pulls on the day before the bumps started occurring (yesterday):



13 hard pulls dated on the AOR or after

=================

10 Soft pulls from American Express Credit Secure

61 Soft Pulls from National City Identity Protect

14 Soft Pulls from Miscellaneous Sources (4 were dated before the AOR)



Total of 98 pulls (85 soft) I figured I would see the other soft pulls that were older than the AOR fall off before I saw any bumpage. I was wrong.



I pulled the two reports today (then I pull the Equifax Gold to see that the soft inq's hit) and learned a lot about the system.



On my first pull, it showed 13 inq's and on my second pull it showed 12 inq's. Equifax Gold showed 11 INQ's which leads me to believe that the request happens before the soft pull is logged. IE You pull the report then it adds the soft inquiry and bumpage occurs.



My totals today were:



11 hard pulls dated on the AOR or after

=================

11 Soft pulls from American Express Credit Secure

62 Soft Pulls from National City Identity Protect

14 Soft Pulls from Miscellaneous Sources (4 were dated before the AOR)



Total of 98 pulls (87 soft). I will also point out that the soft pulls before the AOR are from various sources (Equifax, National City, CitiMortgage). It almost seems like the stack gives preference to soft pulls. I will have to verify in a week or so.



Getting back to how the Equifax Gold service works. On every update (remember pulling Equifax only) it refreshes the date of the soft pull "ND-Equifax Consumer Services" but not adding another one to the stack. This service is obviously garbage for trying to bump (but hey I got it free because of a stolen laptop from somewhere so who cares) but you can see the soft pulls.



This got me to thinking now that I have not had any bumpage from Transunion (and Transunion is supposed to be easier and quicker) so I wonder if in the last couple of months they have updated their system to do the same sort of "refresh" on all of their co branded services (maybe a result of you FW bumpers and black list people ). On my last AOR, the transunion bumps happened first, why not now?



Using the "dispute" method listed below in this thread I pulled my TU report with the soft pulls. I counted the following:



Hard Inq's

4 (dated October)

1 for employment ( before AOR dated)

*** NC Identity protect has always reported 4 which means either employment check hard pulls are not reported or NC has some sort of filter.



Soft Inquiries

Promotional Inq's:

1 From Capital One



Account Review Inq's

11 From Credit Secure ** match in number to the EQ pulls

62 NC identity protect ** match in number to the EQ pulls

6 NC Identity Protect that are in a different format (without name). I have no idea where these came from

17 Miscellaneous pulls

==============

97 Soft pulls (5 hard) and no bumpage...





Is TU still bumpable? Has anyone bumped any TransUnion Inq's in the last month or so?



Update 1-16-08:

After missing my normal 2 pulls yesterday (first time in 16 days), I pulled this morning and on the first pull all 4 TU inquiries are gone. With my count from last week this gives me a total of 102 known pulls, pull 103 is unknown if bumpage occurred. Pull 104, all 4 hard Inq's are gone! It appears that TU is still bumpable but the stack size is definitely bigger than the 98 on EQ.



Update 3-31-08:

It appears that EQ chopped their credit file on or around the end of February eliminating multiple soft pulls from the same service. I have witinessed this as my soft pulls now total 25. The 25 includes 7 pulls that are dated on or after 2-29-08

Update 9-3-08:

TU inq's have come back and it appears that choppage is happening on about a monthly basis.

Some CU's can have discounts for these services, eg this one.

jackcrawfish said:Nice thread. I am very tuned in to see others' experiences (confirming or refuting your experience).

Assuming I have understood your post correctly, might I suggest a small change to title? Perhaps....

"Bumping Using Equifax Based Services Ineffective - Post Your Experiences Here"

Just a thought....

I am more concerned about the fact that almost all of the fatwallet community (myself included) uses or has used TrueCredit, PM123, NC Identity protect. All of which are TU underlying and possibly TU useless.

I'll change the title to something more clear.

I have 4 services cip, AMEX, tc, pm123. When I checked into this I thought I noticed that.

TC = soft
AMEX = soft

but pm123 and cip only equaled 1 soft on tu.

on eq all 4 = 4 softs

I also noticed my younger hard inqs would B* before all of my older softs.

The only thing I could come up with was similiar to the blocks theory but instead of 1 block holding 1 inq (soft or hard) I thought maybe each block held 4 or so inqs (soft or hard).

I have no proof of this, i'm just guessing, but some how my older softs stay and my new hards get B*ed.

To sum up:
With the 4 services I have, I ONLY GET 3 SOFTS PER DAY ON TU.
WITH THE 4 SERVICES I HAVE, I GET 4 SOFTS PER DAY ON EQ.

I have written about this in other threads and I read about it on 1 other thread a few months back. Really this is not new, I figured the extra eq soft was worth it to me.

I also use to have eq gold, I also noticed what you said. That 1st you pull then it puts a soft on (you don't see the soft until the next day) I think GOLD will put about 10 softs on your report then those start getting B*ed so it looks like it is just replacing the last gold soft.

This is hard to follow i'm sure, I'll read comments and try to help. Good thread, thanks for trying.

Win333,

When were you bumping? December? How did you get the list of soft pulls? I'll go through a couple of hoops to get the soft pulls on TU to confirm this. I bumped all of my TU inq's on my first AOR in December with the services mentioned. I think this change is recent. I know that TC went through a bunch of "system" changes in late December. Maybe they cleared out all of the soft pulls for their own service?

I noticed a 1 pull to 1 bump on both services. This assumed that the hard pulls were in order (ie no soft pulls inbetween) if there were spaces in days it seemed to take that many more soft pulls to bump the hard pulls. I will be interested to see what happens on my Equifax service (seeing the soft pulls) when I finish the AOR pulls that happend the day of and there are additional pulls after I started trying to bump.

Thanks to the OP for starting this thread.

In my experiments with EQ Gold and PM123, the soft pull from PM123 was definitely added after the report causing it was pulled.

I also noticed that when pulling with both PM123 and EQ Gold each day, it would take two days to bump a hard inquiry. When pulling with just PM123, it was one day per hard inquiry - as if somehow the EQ Gold pull was pushing the queue back. Not that EQ Gold completely compensates for the PM123 pull, because after each second day a hard would still fall off... hell, maybe it was just a coincidence.

From EQ Gold, I know my EQ report holds a total of 114 total inquiries. Adding a soft with PM123 would tend to bump off a hard even if there were older soft inquiries in the queue. EQ Gold just replaces the date of latest EQ pull with the current date, although I do have several EQ pulls showing at the same time, from ScoreWatch and from a dispute (at least I think that's where they're from).

In terms of overall statistics, my first TU bump occurred at daily PM123 pull #52, followed by a soft bump (#53), another hard (#54), five softs in a row (#55-59), and then three hard inquiries in a row (#60-62). I'm assuming the softs were softs because I can't see them - could be something else was happening. Based on the dates of the hard inquiries that fell off, however (1/4/07, 1/20/07, 6/4/07, 7/23/07, 9/8/07), I think my theory is correct (note the big gap 1/20/07-6/4/07 where it took six pulls to finally bump a hard inquiry off). The hard inquiries definitely bumped off in chronological order.

My first EQ bump occurred at daily PM123 pull #69, but I was pulling with EQ Gold too. Again, I saw two days/bump when I pulled with both and one day/bump when I just pulled with PM123, again in chronological order. Didn't record enough info about the softs to reconstruct the full record, but I do know the oldest softs did not get bumped off. Still, my total number of inquiries stayed at 114 each time I bothered to add them up.

On experian full (dispute) report I see soft pulls from pm123 and ncidprotect, so at least there they are all separate (each date pulled is listed separately).

However, TU may well have adjusted the model so that soft pulls from its services not count more than one (or even none) inquiry per day. Will be interesting to see.

Economist said:However, TU may well have adjusted the model so that soft pulls from its services not count more than one (or even none) inquiry per day.
I am not sure they can do that legally. When I receive my report it has to show every one who requested it. I don’t think they can pick and choice, they have to show every request that was made.

dmlavigne1 said:actually is there anyone pulling lately that has had TU bumps mysteriously stop. This means that the bumps stop and do not restart after the soft pulls in the middle of the hard pulls
EX
top of the stack
hard pull #1
soft pull
soft pull
soft pull
soft pull
soft pull
hard pull #2
I would expect Hard Pull #2 to fall off after 6 additional soft pulls.

Actually, I believe that the TU database / inquiry program prioritizes inquiries into several groups.

1. AR (account review inquiries) somehow have higher priority. I have never seen a self-initiated pull get rid of an AR inquiry, so AR inquiries stay for 2 years.

2. Hard inquiries and self-initiated inquiries share the same space. However, the protocol that cleans space does not delete an old entry for every new entry. Rather, it operates in blocks of a few.

In your example, if the block size is 4, your second hard might disappear after more than 6 new pulls, e.g. 7 or 8.

win333 said:I just checked my softs on tu (I disputed a balance the other day) it doesn't show date, i