Has anyone been a victim of identity theft?? :-(

[impreza]

You would be surprised as to how much information online companies have. The resources they have access to are incredible. I work at an online money transferring service. Things are pretty secure usually, it really does depend on who you're dealing with. Their are many third party agencies that have databases full of information like a person's credit history. The reason their are so many resources for these online companies is because they need to be very careful and to prevent any kind of identity theft. However, their are always hackers out their lurking for important information.

Hope everything works out for you Tony

[Cap'n]

That sucks.

I once had my bank card stolen and they somehow got my PIN. They deposited empty envelopes all weekend and spent all the imaginary money plus everything I had. I went to the bank Monday on my lunch break and reported my card missing (along with everything else in my wallet) and was handed a -$5000 statement!

The cops sighed, filled out the paperwork and said there was nothing they could do.

The bank said it was all my fault since I had signed away my rights when I accepted the privelege of using one of their convenience cards. The best they could do was offer me a good rate on a loan to pay back the bank!!
I don't deal with that bank any more.

[impreza]

I also want to let you know that there is a 6month (180 BUSINESS DAYS!!!) grace period for you to issue a chargeback. In my experience, the credit card company never holds the cardholder responsible for transactions that the cardholder didn't authorize.

[Delphinus]

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.

[Aquattro]

Tony, have you spoken to anyone at Telus? Maybe they have a security department that could easily trace back calls made from a cell phone. By contacting the people tht received calls, they should be able to figure out who made the calls. Explain what's happened and that you will not be paying for this. Also have internal Telus collections withdraw the account from the collection agency. Just keep hounding them until they give in.

[Delphinus]

Yeah, Telus was one of the first places she talked to. Supposedly they will take care of the collection agency. Who knows how fast they get called off though. What I'm wondering if it's the same case or a different case that they're calling me again looking for "Brad". We shall see how it goes.

Apparently you can have your credit file flagged so that if there's any change to it, someone has to call you to verify. Now I guess my question is, if this sort of fraud is becoming more common, why aren't they automatically going to that sort of setup?

But then you know, cell phone merchants and utilities aren't doing anybody any favours by accepting these applications without going through a more rigorous verification process. It seems to me if they got more diligent, more of these cases would get nipped in the bud.

According to Human Resouces Canada, there's nothing that can be done to flag your file or whatever in the case that there's someone running around using your SIN. That's handy.

[Quinn]

And the Liberals want to give us all that one cover-all card.

[DiscusZ]

That Sucks Tony..

Since I have been a computer person since the mid 80's you learn alot of stuff, see a lot of stuff. We will not go into what I have done, or know

Check out

http://www.hackcanada.com/canadian/other/sin.html Its a very intersting read if your interested in the SIN

In have only hard of it happening.. Well once someone used my brothers credit card in California, yet he has never been there. He had a bitch of a time with VISA getting all the charges revoked.

Jim