I've been prepaid T-Mobile customer for a while. I wanted to switch to post-paid service and that process failed miserably. Here's my story.
Last autumn T-Mobile made some changes to Simple Choice plans so that I decided to switch to post-paid account. There was good iPhone 5 deal through my employer at that time, so I decided to try that online. After filling out all necessary information online, I was informed that my SSN was required to process my order and that would be a soft check. I provided my SSN but further online processing failed informing me that i need to make a call to complete processing. I called and worked with sales representative that had to connect credit and finance department representative to the call in order to verify credit eligibility. After providing necessary information including SSN credit and finance representative told me that he provided necessary input to sales representative and disconnected from the call. Sales representative informed me that I was only eligible for pre-paid service at that time, so I could not use iPhone 5 deal. Nothing happened to my credit report as a result of that, so that it looks like credit inquiry at that time was really soft.
Couple of days later I was passing by the T-Mobile store in a mall, so I decided to stop by and check to see if I may be eligible just for post-paid service without any phone installment plan. Store representative informed me that SSN will be required to check eligibility and that would be soft inquiry. I agreed to provide it and entered all necessary information on the store terminal. After a few tries store representative informed me that there may be something wrong with the system and that he needed to make a call. He called some department (i guess credit and finance) to discuss my situation and then asked me to answer questions on the phone in order to complete my eligibility check. I answered all the question and provided my SSN once again, just to learn that it was not possible to verify my information and I was eligible only for pre-paid service.
I see how T-Mobile staff is trying to be positive, but I think this was too much. I was using pre-paid service and was looking for an answer to the question about being eligible for post-paid service, so I could easily accept negative answer to that, and I consider the "positive" answer I got much worse than the straight negative answer. But this is not an end of my story. At that time I decided that I should stay with pre-paid service.
Next morning I received notification that hard inquiry was placed on my credit report. This contradicted statements of the store representative so I called phone support to get that inquiry removed as I did not enter any post-paid agreement with T-Mobile so there was no reason to place hard credit inquiry. After spending more couple of hours on the phone and being forwarded to lots of different people who had no clue, i was connected with a person who tried to help me. He informed me that in order to verify my identity he needed to get some information from me including SSN. I answered required questions and after a few tries he informed me nothing could be done as he could not verify my information. That was frustrating.
It got even more frustrating the next morning when I got notification that another hard inquiry was placed on my credit report!!!
So here I am with two extra credit inquiries and no service I want!! I thought it was not a big deal as I decided to stay with pre-paid service. But i had to change my mind as when i needed to apply for a car loan i was denied it as i had too many credit inquiries! I ordered my credit report and it provided me with some details about your inquiries that resulted in negative decision - it looked like there was a mistake in mailing address that was entered - it used street number second time as a unit number. The letter from T-Mobile that I got stated that my T-Mobile credit score was 906 on a range from a low of 1 to a high of 1000. It does not sound like a bad score, so i believe the reason for being unable to verify my information was incorrect mailing address.
So now i would like to either get erroneous second inquiry off my credit report and have the post-paid service, or in case if I'm still eligible only for pre-paid service get both hard inquiries off my credit report, as in the latter case there's no reason to have them on my credit report as I do not have any credit with T-Mobile and I did not authorize those credit inquiries in the first place, and as I my initial experience shows some inquiries performed by T-Mobile are really soft ones, which makes me think that T-Mobile representative are not lying about soft inquiries.
Please contact me privately if you need further clarification.
Looking forward for your cooperation!