If this was a credit card I'd probably have a bit of an easier time with things. Plus credit card companies are getting better at questioning out-of-character charges. I.e., they call you and ask "are you buying $10,000 of stereo equipment on your card? Because someone is trying that right now" and you can either say "yeah that's me" or "huh?! what the .. ??".
I wish merchants and utilities would be a little more dilligent about questioning and following up on checking the submitted facts when people apply for stuff. In this case right now, someone with just a modicum of information was able to pretend to be someone else and get a cell phone. The weird thing is they paid for it for the first few months and then at some point over the summer, stopped, and now Telus has sent out a collection agency against us to collect some $1000 in charges.
I can assure you I do NOT owe Telus $1000.
The worrisome thing is, if someone was able to do this much, what else are they able to do now.
And another worrisome thing is that same darn collection agency called my home yesterday again and left a message, but this time asking for "Brad." So I'm thinking, what the heck now?!
(Brad, you pretending to be me again?! Stop that at once!!!!
)
Ahhh ... what a nuisance. Personally I find this whole thing to be more along the lines of an irritance and an inconvenience. There are far more violative things that can happen to you. Unfortunately my wife is taking it quite a bit harder though. She's the actual victim and since she's always been so squeaky clean about money she's sort of taken it as some sort of attack on her character. Unfortunately, what's done is done now and now we just have to do whatever we have to to slowly crawl out of this. Hopefully it doesn't get any worse but at least now we know that something's up and we can do something about it.
Incidentally since the Telus person left a fictional billing address in Surrey, the city of Calgary police will have nothing to do with this case. They told us to talk to the Surrey police. Nice. .... Not surprising I suppose. What are they going to do anyhow.