<prompt> Human: Before I explain the situation, I will add that my name and my brothers name are almost identical 1 letter apart, which is probably why this happened. My brother recently signed up for a cell phone plan through Verizon. Im with a completely separate provider, live at a completely different address, etc..For some reason, I received a notification from my credit monitoring service that a hard inquiry was made by Verizon.I will add, I have great credit, and I dont think its a huge deal, but obviously would prefer not to have this on my report. What can I do?  <response>: It is also possible that the OPs credit has become commingled with his brothers because of the very close spellings of their names. I agree that confirming which SSN was used on the cell phone application is the first step. Then getting with the credit reporting agencies to make sure that each brothers files contain only their respective data. 