ID Theft - What happened to me

I was recently a victim of Identity Theft. I don't know if two people stole parts of my information or if it was all one. One problem was my credit card being used. The other was someone trying to open auto loans and pay day loans with my information.

Credit Card Stolen
The bank actually caught this one before I did, and I look at my history online all the time. Two charges were made: one was an actual purchase and the second was a $1.00 charge. The bank said that this was typical of credit card thieves to see if the card is active. We immediately cancelled our card and had them issue a new one.

What a pain though to have to cancel your card. We had several bills that went direct to our credit card and we had to contact all of those places to update our account. We were without a credit card for several days. We also lost all of our points we accrue for airline tickets and such. I'm hoping to get those back, and if I do, I'll post about that. If not, well, that was a big loss of money.

ID Theft
The more troubling issue was when auto loan people started calling. I had five of these in a span of a week saying they wanted to help me finish the online application I had started. As far as I know, all of the loan applications were stopped before any money or cars were given to this thief. Shortly after the auto loan people called, I started getting pay day loan people calling saying they wanted to help me finish my pay day loan application. This is super scary stuff.

With the car loans and new credit, they are supposed to check your credit reports. I now have a whole list of things you should do and can do to stop this. Most of it is found on various web sites, but some of it I learned as I went. Check my other blog post about all of these things you can do if you're a victim of identity theft.

The pay day loan was an even scarier proposition. They don't actually check your credit reports. I was astonished. But, I did find out the system they do check, and there's a way to block that as well. Check my other blog post about this too.

I hope you're not a victim of ID theft and are reading this out of curiousity. If you are a victim too, I feel your pain and I hope I can help.