Check your credit!

Long story short-ish, my wife and I BOTH have recently had our “identities” compromised where someone applied for, and opened credit cards using our personal information (SSN, address info, etc). By pure luck, we were able to catch it early enough in the process where only one charge had been made on the account in her name and none yet on mine. We’ve taken steps to report the fraud to the credit card company and all three credit reporting agencies. And it’s under investigation.

There have been several large scale data breaches over the last few years, some of which have compromised the personal data of 10’s of millions of people directly from the credit reporting agencies (Experian specifically), as well as Target, T-Mobile, Home Depot, etc. Even the Office of Personnel Management for the US Government was compromised to the tune of 20+ million personally identifiable information records of not just gov’t employees, but family members as well as personal references given for background checks. So as they say, it’s not if, but when.

You are all allowed one free credit report from each of the 3 reporting agencies (Trans Union, Equifax and Experian) annually. And you can access them more frequently for a fee. I suggest that if you have not reviewed your report/s in a while, you should. Keep in mind, there may be differing info between the three, so it really takes all three reports to get the complete picture. In my case, the newly opened credit card account had not even posted to trans union yet, so if I had only looked at that report I wouldn’t have seen it.

If you have suspicious activity on your report, you can place a 90 day fraud alert w/the three agencies. I’m not too clear on why a FRAUD ALERT is not a default setting for everyone’s account, but I digress. You only need to contact one agency to place the alert and they’re supposed to contact the other two on your behalf. I’ve also read that this is not 100% foolproof either. You’ll also have to call the company where an account may have been opened (Chase and Synchrony Bank in our case) to dispute and close out the accounts as well as launch the fraud investigation. We’re also trying to determine if we need to file a police report once we get the results of the “fraud investigation” but I’m not holding my breath on any substantive information.

There are several monitoring and protection services that you can pay for that will send you alerts of suspicious activity or new inquiries on your credit. But some of these come with mixed reviews. Additionally there are free services that can help you monitor and improve your credit score. But caveat emptor.

Lastly, you can go so far as to place a credit freeze on your account where no new accounts or activity can be created until you remove or suspend the freeze. Like if you know you need to open an account or get approval for a loan. And there is a fee with each credit agency to do this.

Bottom line, check your reports, and be diligent.

I had mine stolen back in 1998 from a couple in florida. only good thing I have ever said about wells fargo when they stopped it(a whole 'nother story). was somewhat of a hassle to get fixed but was able to. it was only caught ahead of time as back then, most fraud in the us initiated east of the mississippi and apparently if you banked in the west, east coast activity was flagged.

have had good luck with credit karma in watching for open activity and it seems to be well aligned with the yearly free credit report you can obtain. as pound mentions tho take that with a grain...

it is interesting that those credit monitoring agencies(which are their own invention) are so quick to add marks to your history but try to delete something and it takes hours of time and followup...

I get free monitoring and doing some financial stuff and sure enough I get emails. I check anyway.

you know it's no wonder that this stuff happens tho. I bet I shred 4-6 credit card offers a week from someone that used to live with me. everyone should go to the opt-out website to save a tree :)

I had this 2 years ago but caught it with my credit monitoring service very quickly, long story short have your credit files frozen. There's no reason not too, prevents anyone from opening anything up. If you have a police report its free depending on state. You need to freeze all three equiax, experian, transunion.


https://www.transunion.com/credit-fr...-credit-freeze

Good reminder!!

Glad to hear you got that sorted out before things got out of hand. I've had my identity stolen twice and now pay $19 a month for instant updates about any credit activity.

The first time it was actually stolen by an old childhood friend turned scam artist. There was actually a bank account set up in my name that was used to sell all sorts of fraudulent product to people in the UK. It wasn't until I started receiving threatening phone calls from angry customers that I realized what was going on. They had been getting swindled out of tens of thousands of dollars.

At the time I was just a youngster and took some time off university to bust my ass in the oil patch for a semester. I was up in the bush in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception, let alone Internet connection. Back then (2007ish) the police didn't have a good grasp on dealing with Internet crime so nothing got done but the police were aware of the situation.

Nothing was done about it for nearly a decade, until one day I was contacted by the police for questioning. They had absolutely no record of me bringing the case to them in the first place. Turns out I was the prime suspect and they expected to be booking me on charges that day. It was just like the TV shows, they sweated me out in a small hot interrogation room for almost 2 hours. Luckily there were some details that I provided them that allowed me to leave the station a free man that day. Let me say this, there is absolutely nothing like the feeling of having your freedom threatened. Luckily, this former friends self destructive nature got the best of him last year.

The second time was similar to the op. Thousands of dollars worth of plane tickets purchase on a credit card in my name. To me, that $19/month is priceless piece of mind.

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And right on queue.... Yahoo admits breach of 500 million records!!!! (seriously, do they even have that many accounts). What's disturbing is, this happened back in 2014. why the hell are we just now finding out about it!?

Mattsask, that would be frustrating! I tried to find out any details i could about who it might have been in case it was a family member or friend, but no one could provide me any details. At the end of the day, i don't think anyone really cares about it because with global commerce, fraud is a tiny tiny stream on a raging river of transactions. I think their "fraud departments" are only there for public relations. If 2 tenths of one percent of a retailer's product is fraudulently purchased or stolen, they know that and just bake that into their financials and add it to the price of the goods sold legitimately. so in the end, we (consumers) pay regardless.