I applied for an account on lending tree.com because I am thinking about refinancing my auto loan but I wanted to look into various options before committing to any hard credit inquiries. I signed up on leaning tree because it explicitly says in the sign up process that it would only be a soft credit inquiry against my credit. Within a week, I had XXXX hard credit inquiries hit my credit score and lower it from a XXXX to a XXXX. I have been working very hard to build my credit and it is not easy especially when I have so many inquiries within a short period of time. All I wanted to do was look into a couple of different options without any hard inquiries. 
