Credit Card Pre selection Letters

This "pre-selected" malarky is basically just a scam. You are not pre-approved for the card/loan, nor have you been vetted in any way, almost always pre-selected just means "we bought your name and address on a huge list".

The pre-selected wording is just a different marketing strategy that suits some companies, one more mailshot method amongst hundreds.

In the UK companies cannot credit check you without your express permission, so these invitations to apply have not been checked against your record with the referencing agencies. If you take up the offer and apply you will be credit checked and scored in the usual way.

Well I was preselected by HSBC and given a credit limit of £12000 (more than double that of my next highest limit). All I had to do was sign a form which had my address and I think, date of birth.
It said on the accompanying letter that they had preselected me based on certain info they had about me. I have a current account with them but I opened that as a student account more than 16 years ago and have not given them any financial details since. I use this account to recieve balance transfer money from other cards and this happens quite regularly so I think that HSBC may have mistook this for my monthly salary and based their offer on this piece of data.
Even better was the letter my wife got informing her that she was preselected to recieve a card as well and was given the exact same credit limit. They also based this offer on 'information' they held about her. This could be due to the fact that she is a joint current account holder with me now and whatever selection process they use must have blindly selected all the names registered with the account. This is extremely funny as my wife does not work and has never had a job. So she has now got this card as well and has not had to sign any untruthful declarations. We are now holding almost 24K of HSBC's money in a high paying savings account(it could have been even more ironic if I could have found a decent account at HSBC to store their own money but I didn't manage to do so) .

So my tip is get your spouse signed up to your current account if you bank at HSBC and you never know what you might get through the letterbox.(I'll proabably get something brown and smelly if HSBC read this and put 2 and 2 together though)

PRE = before

pre - selected = before (being) selected

Agree with you totally but somehow 'pre' in this context makes you think you have already been selected. ??? Clever use of wording to mislead

Seems a little shabby to me, but then I wouldn't expect anything else from the crafty gits.

When they do things they are crafty gits.
When we do things we are astute operatives.
;D ;D ;D