Applying For Capital One Credit Cards With A Frozen Credit Report

I imagine a lot of readers are applying for Capital One credit cards because of the announcement that miles will be transferable to airline partners at a 2:1.5 rate sometime in December and because of the following increased bonuses:

• Capital One Spark Cash $2,000 Signup Bonus & Spark Miles 200,000 Signup Bonus (6% Back)
• Capital One Venture 75,000 Point Sign Up Bonus (Worth $750 Or 56,250 Airline Miles)

One of the downsides to applying for a Capital One card is that they pull your credit report from all three nationwide consumer reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian & TransUnion). Our advice in general has been that it’s possible to freeze one or more of these reports and still get approved. I thought it would be useful to collect some information/datapoints on what has/hasn’t been working.

Keep in mind just because you’re application has been denied, it does not mean it was denied due to a frozen report. If you are denied you’ll receive a notice of adverse action, this will state the denial reason. If it’s for something like a frozen report it will state something such as:

Based on your credit report from <Experian/TransUnion/Equifax>, credit bureau information is missing or unavailable

Another common denial reason is:

Based on your credit report from <Experian/TransUnion/Equifax>, there are too many new accounts

For the purposes of this post we are only interested in your data point if you received the first (information is missing) denial reason. The second reason has to do with new accounts and is talked about here.  Onto the data points:

• Frozen Experian:
  • Approved: 1
  • Denied: 1, 2, 3,
• Frozen TransUnion:
  • Denied: 1,

Note there are also some older data points found in this post.