Mortgage Lender Illegally Pulled Credit

We are shopping around for lenders to apply for a mortgage on our first home. We are very new and still learning. Since we’re looking at multiple lenders, I didn’t want any hard credit pulls until we had a better idea/looked at houses. This is because it can negatively impact your credit score.

So when I applied for a pre-qualification it was all on the lenders website. This is where I explicitly stated by clicking “no” for my authorization to run a credit check. I never spoke to anyone from the company.

I get a call today from the lender stating that they went ahead and ran the hard credit check. Lo and behold I check my bank and my credit score was negatively affected.

I told the lender that this was not okay and that I did not give authorization for them to do that. They did not really care and told me they would look into it.