refused o2 mobile contract after credit check…but confused to why refused..?

had a soft credit check done before contract but was refused
have a mortgage and a cc paid in full in every month, no debts and im on the electoral register at my address…
bit confused to why i was refused, o2 only deal with email wrt this and will try to get to me within 10 days….
anyone have any ideas?

Last time I had credit refused it was because someone else at the same address had borrowed money.

not the case here either..we’ve been here 14 years or so

Easy way to check is to sign up with Experian for your free month (or whatever they do now). Alternatively phone the credit company as thy also might be able to give some details. Definitely do something though, if you can’t even get a phone the something is definitely not looking good

Get on experian sharpish, A similar thing happened to me, a check of my credit report turned up an attempt to use some of my details to get a payday loan. It was unsuccessful because they had obviously guessed some of my details, wasn’t too difficult to get it removed and my proper credit score restored.

Experian are now free for the basic credit score feature, guessing the were getting threatened by noodle.

This happens with me on Vodafone and has for 15 years. I have no problems with anything else.

I have this at both Vodafone and O2, despite having a 999 credit score. I ended up getting pretty frustrated with the guy in the store but it seemed to be a “computer sez noooooo” situation.

I ended up on EE, where I can’t get a signal in my own house despite it apparently being a full 4G area.

Your lack of being in debt before might be holding you back. Credit scores are all about your debt-worthiness – are you a good person to lend to, have a history of carrying debt and paying it back. If you have little or no debt history then you will have a poor score. Our world is built on and around debt. Without it you’re ‘off grid’!

Cash is no longer king – debt is where its at.

Register with Noddle. Its free (for life) and it may give you an indication?

Had similar, was refused a limit increase on my C/C (from £500 to £750, used for online purchases for protection) and they said to check my credit score. Signed up to Noddle and found that my old bank – Barclays – had failed to close one of my old accounts down and let it run up £1k of charges over 2 years before marking it as a bad debt!! They’d even increased the overdraft limit on it despite no account activity at all and me having a ‘Account Closure’ statement.

Took a few weeks to sort out but it’s all good now. Regularly check your credit score, it’s the lifeblood of society now even if you don’t have much credit.

Thanks for the heads up regarding Experian being free. Oddly since taking a mortgage out in August last year, my credit score has dropped from 966 to 850.
Wonder why, I have no other debts, credit or loans.

It might not be a ‘score’ issue, sometimes the problem is that records are (or seem to be) incomplete. Aside from your actual performance with past credit deals (or a lack of any credit use) there are more fundamental checks like electoral role, council tax registration and so on – if they don’t appear on your reference or appear incorrectly then that borks the application.

I’ve found the biggest problem with credit refusal for things like phones is any disparity between the addresses that various agencies use for your house – if its just a house number and street then that might be unlikely. But if the house is named or if its a flat then sometimes various utilities, council tax etc will state that address slightly differently. Similarly it can be an issue if any of those agencies mis-spell your name.

For instnace I had a flat was called “Ground Floor Flat” “G1” and “0/1” by various agencies. So if I gave my address as “Ground Floor Flat” in a credit check (which was the address used on all the bills and utilities) I appeared not the be on the electoral role or paying council tax as they both stated the address differently so there seemed to be no record at all.

I had to make arrangements with Experian so that all their records for me used the same address and then make sure that was the version I used in any application.

There’s also a “free” online offering from Clearscore – Google it.

not the case here either..we’ve been here 14 years or so

I had been at my address for several years too. It turned out that my mum had rung up a shit-heap of debts and hidden them from the family.

I found this out as I was applying for a mortgage so ended up using my savings to help clear her debts 🙁

I ended up on EE, where I can’t get a signal in my own house despite it apparently being a full 4G area.

Turn on your WiFi calling.

bigyinn – Member

Thanks for the heads up regarding Experian being free. Oddly since taking a mortgage out in August last year, my credit score has dropped from 966 to 850.
Wonder why, I have no other debts, credit or loans.

Firstly the ‘score’ is bobbings, you might as well ask Mystic Meg for a review of your credit worthiness. Each and every potential credit provider will buy raw data from the CRAs and calculate their down ‘score’ on every application. (it’s rarely an actual number, it’s more like Yes, No or Maybe).

As for the reasoning behind the drop, there is more to it than whether you’ve been a good boy/girl in the past. ‘Affordability’ is the watch-word post Credit Crunch. People tend to get a huge amount of searches recorded when they move house, every Tom, Dick and Harry from your Gas provider to your home insurance provider these days will want a CRA report and it created a huge amount of searches – to a CRA ‘credit score’ this might be seen as a bad thing, in the 90s too many searches was called being ‘credit hungry’ and a bit of a red flag – but these days it’s just not an issue despite the fact that every organisation who handles money seems to want to make a search these days, people are more savvy and shop around for everything creating lots more searches – it’s just not an issue anymore, but CRAs being CRAs they’ll drop your ‘score’ for it to remind you why you need them.

If your credit worthiness has fallen it’s because you’ve just taken on a huge new debt, I.E. your mortgage, and your income hasn’t changed you can’t afford to pay what you could before – you might have been paying rent to the same level, but that’s rarely shown on a CRA report – it WILL show on a proper credit application you make so the effect might be negligible.

I had been at my address for several years too. It turned out that my mum had rung up a shit-heap of debts and hidden them from the family.

Unless we’re talking about 20+ years ago it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference, if we are a notice of dissociation would have been pretty much free. Unless you wanted to help your mum out of course.

Last time I had credit refused it was because someone else at the same address had borrowed money.

They haven’t ‘blacklisted addresses’ in 30 years or more, and it was 90% myth back then.

bit confused to why i was refused

Thats the most frustrating thing really – the refusal without reason. It makes finding the cause of the refusal a real ball ache. If its a reason of affordability or credit history say so. If its incomplete history say so. But when something is refused the reason isn’t given – usually because of ‘data protection’. Its my data you **** idiots.

this ^^^

maccruiskeen – Member

bit confused to why i was refused

Thats the most frustrating thing really – the refusal without reason. It makes finding the cause of the refusal a real ball ache. If its a reason of affordability or credit history say so. If its incomplete history say so. But when something is refused the reason isn’t given – usually because of ‘data protection’. Its my data you **** idiots.

They will NEVER tell you why, it’s not data protection either – the DPA is another catch-all excuse people use when they want to lie or CBA telling the whole story – it’s like “Health and Safety” or “EU”.

Truth is underwriting is a dark art, finance companies and other providers spend a huge amount of time and money setting underwriting algorithms to get the right amount of return and right amount of bad debt – the truth is that anyone you’ll even get close to speaking to as a customer simply won’t know why it was declined, and if you did speak to a policy making underwriter it would take them an age to go through all the parameters to work out why you ended up in the no pile. Not that they’d tell you anyway, they spent millions devising them, they don’t want them ending up in the wrong hands.

You can shout and moan about it as long as you like, but unless they made a mistake in entering your details they won’t change their mind – modern underwriting systems require consistent, quantifiable data to work, they can’t go letting minions over-rule the system and messing it up.

modern underwriting systems require consistent, quantifiable data to work,

Fine if thats the reason – that they’ve carefully assessed risk based on the data. But if the reason is simply ‘you don’t seem to be on the electoral roll’ in other words the data they’re assessing is incomplete – then non of those million pound algorithms are involved.

I had to figure out those errors for myself and it only came to light because some mobile phone providers were asking for addresses over a longer time frame than others that the inconstancy with address writing came to light.

But when something is refused the reason isn’t given – usually because of ‘data protection’. Its my data you **** idiots.

Actually, it isn’t. Your data (including but not limited to an Experian score) is the input to the system, but the calculated result is something else. FWIW the new online mortgage application I’m helping develop will at some point in the near future provide the decision reasons to their clients.

maccruiskeen – Member

modern underwriting systems require consistent, quantifiable data to work,

Fine if thats the reason – that they’ve carefully assessed risk based on the data. But if the reason is simply ‘you don’t seem to be on the electoral roll’ in other words the data they’re assessing is incomplete – then non of those million pound algorithms are involved.

I had to figure out those errors for myself and it only came to light because some mobile phone providers were asking for addresses over a longer time frame than others that the inconstancy with address writing came to light.

There are few factors that cause an automatic no, not being on the electoral roll isn’t one of them – it will have a weighting, but not a major one. IFAs etc often cite it because it’s an easy fix, not because it’s a major deal breaker.

Honestly, it was my business to know all this shit for years and years – my advice, if you’re refused for anything – get your Noodle report, they’re about the best free one IMHO – unless it shows something obvious that’s not right or you wern’t aware of – like a CCJ from the bulk centre at an old address or some identity fraud etc you can fix – move on, try another provider.

I don’t know why, but Orange Mobile would NEVER give me a contract, not even a sim-only deal – for whatever reason they didn’t want my busines despite 3 attempts over a 7 year period (not my idea) EE, Ironically will, so would T-Mobile, despite them all being one and the same now. I don’t know why, probably a slightly mis-entered application 10 years ago put me on their internal fraud shit-list forever more, I could have fixed it, by making them remove it but why bother when signal isn’t an issue on any provider where I live and there were many more to chose from. It’s not personal.

P-Jay,
Thanks for the clarification. I suspected the huge new debt might be the cause.

I don’t know why, but Orange Mobile would NEVER give me a contract, not even a sim-only deal – for whatever reason they didn’t want my busines

Orange was the pain of me too – at the time they were the ones that asked for more years of proof of address than anyone else. It was a pain because their signal was the only one viable in the key places I needed to use the phone- it was forcing me to use PAYG but at the time that was working out really pricy for the call volume I needed

At that point I’d moved a few 5 times in the 6 year range they wanted – all named houses or flats in subdivided houses. So I went through the experian report and got them to make sure all the address info correlated properly – applied again and got accepted.

Unless we’re talking about 20+ years ago it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference, if we are a notice of dissociation would have been pretty much free. Unless you wanted to help your mum out of course.

It was almost exactly 20 years ago actually. Not a high point for our family at the time. As I recall, I had to clear their debts then do some paperwork and re-apply for my loan, which I then got.