I recently signed up with a Telco company on post-paid service with a Tab and they said that to do so, they required a credit check.
I thought that it would be completely harmless but when I pulled my credit report/score recently, my score had dropped almost 50 points from before. The only difference was that there was the additional Telco inquiry posted on my report.
I assume they did a hard check instead of a soft check. Is hard checks this damaging to the credit score? It was enough to drop me out of the "excellent" bracket.
How can I get my credit score back up?