Farmers Insurance Marketing or Legal departments RUNNING CREDIT REPORT 4 TIMES WITHOUT PERMISSION VIOLATED FAIR CREDIT ACT REPORTED TO FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION Los Angeles, California

Robert explained credit inquiries perfectly and is correct in the difference between hard and soft pulls.

First of all I don't know where you heard you could get $2,700 per occurrence for violations of the FCRA.  You can get up to $1,000 in Statutory Damages and any actual damages.  So you would have to prove the additional $1,700 in damages to obtain that.

Next before you go all freaky on your credit report being accessed, what type of inquiry was it?

If it was a "soft" inquiry that is a "pre-approval" pull that is used for marketing purposes.  These types of inquires DO NOT affect your credit score and in fact are not even seen by anybody else except for you.  The company getting this information also only gets a limited amount of information, generally not much more than your contact information and very general credit information.   They do not get specific account information or status.

For a "soft" inquiry because of the type of information obtained they do not need any approval from you.  However, you can stop these by going to optoutprescreen dot com which will take you off of this list.

Now, if this is a "hard" inquiry that is a request for credit you do have a right to worry as it could be an indication of Identity Theft.  But Farmers is not just going around randomly putting in SSN's to pull credit reports...someone who was using your information gave this to them.  In that case your alerts did exactly what they were supposed to do..alert you that someone was trying to get credit in your name but it was not Farmers.