This is a factual account. Every date and quote below is from written correspondence I hold. I have removed my PAN, phone and email. Everything else is as it happened.
The defect
I have one PAN. I should have one credit profile. I had two.
My correct profile was clean. Over twenty accounts. Full repayment history. Score 806.
A second profile existed under the same PAN. No account history. No contact details. Score recorded by CIBIL itself as 000-1. It held exactly three things: three hard enquiries, made by two banks, over sixteen months.
I did not create this profile. A consumer cannot create a credit profile. Only a lender can, by sending data to the bureau. Every enquiry on that profile came from a bank, not from me.
What it cost me
Each of the three enquiries maps to a rejection.
March 2025. Applied for a card. Rejected. I complained to the RBI Ombudsman separately at the time. That closure order recorded that the bank rejected me because my CIBIL score was non-existent.
February 2026. Applied again, different bank. Rejected. The bank told me in writing: rejected because my CIBIL status showed as minus one.
July 2026. Applied to a third bank. Rejected the same day the enquiry hit the bad profile.
I only came to know about the ghost profile when I was checking my credit score on the SBI Yono app coincidentally after the 3rd rejection.
Then CIBIL quietly merged the two profiles after my complaint. Fifteen days later, that same third bank pulled a fresh enquiry. Same applicant. Same bank. Same card. This time, approved.
Nothing about me changed in those fifteen days. Only the profile CIBIL served changed.
Two questions, never answered
I complained in writing the day I found this. I asked two things, again and again, for seven weeks.
When was the second profile created?
Which lenders were served it, and when, before it was merged?
I still do not know. Neither does anyone who checked my credit during whatever period this ran. The three rejections I found are the ones I happened to notice. I have no way to know if there were more.
I asked five times over five weeks. The replies: a request for information I had already sent them. A reply about a totally different dispute with a different bank. Two identical marketing emails. Then, after I went to the Ombudsman, a reply blaming my own data entry for a profile built entirely from bank enquiries I never typed anywhere.
Neither question has been answered. Not once.
A dispute decided before it was properly asked
When I requested to remove the three enquiries (which got added from ghost profile to main profile after merger), CIBIL logged all three under one ground: Never Applied with this Bank.
I never said that. I have applied to these banks. I said so in writing, repeatedly.
The day before CIBIL referred my dispute to the banks, I wrote to them directly. I told them: I did apply; I am not disputing that. Please fix the ground before you refer this. I even wrote, word for word, that if they asked the banks whether I applied, the banks would correctly say yes, and my dispute would be closed on a question I never raised.
The next day, they referred it anyway, on the same wrong ground. The banks confirmed I had applied. All three disputes were rejected, on the finding that the enquiries were made with my consent. That is the answer to a question I had withdrawn in writing less than a day earlier.
Their own closure letter proves this. It prints Never Applied with this Bank as the ground. Its own timeline shows the referral went out after my written correction.
Their Internal Ombudsman upheld it. Two of the three rejections were upheld within one day of the bank’s reply, on identical text.
CIBIL told the regulator it had received nothing
This is the part that made me write this post.
Late in the process, CIBIL emailed asking me to send evidence that the two profiles existed. Evidence they had already given the Ombudsman weeks earlier. Evidence they had already confirmed to me in writing.
I replied 24 minutes later with three of their own reports attached, showing both profiles, five days apart, one full and one empty. Their own system sent me an automatic acknowledgement with a service request number.
Three days later, my complaint before the RBI Ombudsman, Jammu, was closed.
The closure letter states, as a finding of fact, that CIBIL had not received any evidence of the two profiles.
That is false. The evidence was sent, received, and acknowledged by CIBIL’s own system three days before the closure was written. I have the timestamp and the acknowledgement number.
The closure
Complaint closed. All aspects fully settled. Not appealable.
Nothing was settled. Both disclosure questions are still open. The wrong dispute ground was never addressed. And the one finding the whole closure rests on, that no evidence was given, is disproved by CIBIL’s own system log.
I have sent a written representation to the Ombudsman Jammu pointing this out, using only the facts on record. I am told these closures are rarely reopened. I am not expecting much.
Why I am posting this
Not to reopen my case in public. I have already used the real channels for that, including writing to RBI’s consumer protection department and its supervision department.
I am posting this because a bureau that RBI licenses ran two profiles under one identity for over a year. It would not say for how long. It would not say who saw it. It closed a dispute on a question I had already told it not to ask. It told a regulator it had received nothing, three days after its own system confirmed it had. And the process meant to catch exactly this closed the file anyway, on the entity’s word alone.
If you are dealing with something similar, ask two things in writing, every single time you write to them: when was any duplicate record created, and who accessed it before it was fixed. Keep every timestamp. On this evidence, it is the only thing that matters when it lands in front of a regulator that does not check what it is told against its own file.