Truth 38 It all started with a phone call

While the name of the person in this story has been changed, her story is true. Kathy Smith grew up in California, went to school in Houston, and settled down in a small town in Oklahoma. It isn’t the kind of place where she worried about crime like she would in the big cities. Unfortunately for Kathy and millions of others throughout the United States, identity theft doesn’t discriminate based on your zip code.

In April 2007, Kathy received a phone call from a cell phone carrier. The caller asked to speak with Kathy Jones. Kathy was a little confused at first since Jones was her maiden name. She explained that she was formerly Kathy Jones and asked what the call was regarding. The caller asked her if she had purchased a cell phone plan with a cell phone carrier in Houston, Texas. She told the caller that she had not set up an account with this company. The caller then read off the last four digits of her social security number and asked if it belonged to her. It did.

The caller then explained that someone had purchased cellular service using her personal information. Also, while the thief paid the first few phone bills, the thief had stopped paying and the account was delinquent. Kathy made it clear that someone else had used her information. So she was transferred to the fraud department.

As the fraud department investigated the issue further, it was determined that the person using her information had given an incorrect birth date for Kathy. However, that mistake did not stop the thief from getting the original service agreement.

Since Kathy was not sure how to handle this type of crime, she was instructed by the cell carrier to contact the proper reporting agencies and file a fraud alert. While it is true that she needed to file a fraud alert, in reality she should have first gone to the police and filed an identity theft report. This omission came back to haunt Kathy later.

Kathy called the credit reporting agency and was walked through filing the fraud alert. Once she was done, she felt confident that she had addressed the matter and things would go back to normal. This is often what happens when people first become victims of identity theft. Most victims deal with the initial problem and assume that the issue has been resolved for good. Unfortunately, it generally is not that simple, and the first notification is only the starting point.

A few months later, Kathy started receiving credit card bills. Some of them were for credit cards using her maiden name, and others were for credit cards using a misspelled version of her current name. On average, the credit cards had a limit of $1,000, and each one was maxed out. Of course, the person using the cards had failed to make any payments, and the card issuers had now tracked down the real Kathy under the assumption that she was evading payment.

After talking to the first credit card company and explaining that she had not opened the account, she was told that she needed to file a police report immediately. She would also need to fill out some forms, get them notarized, and then send everything back to the credit card company. The company also told her that she had a limited time in which to take care of the matter. Kathy filed the identity theft report with the police, had the forms notarized, and then sent them to the credit card company. She was now starting to understand how serious this really was.

After dealing with the first credit card company, she followed suit with the second, third, and fourth companies. Fighting this identity theft was becoming a full-time job for Kathy.

Finally, she started to feel as though she was getting control of her identity again. Because the credit cards had been issued before she had filed her fraud alert, she now thought she had shut the identity thief down. Unfortunately, the original fraud alert Kathy filed lasted for only 90 days. Of course, Kathy didn’t know the fraud alert had expired, and sure enough, shortly after the fraud alert was lifted, the identity thief opened another credit card.

Unfortunately, no one told Kathy that filing the proper identity theft report with the police entitled her to receive a free seven-year fraud alert and a free credit freeze. In fact, until I was interviewing her for this story, she had never even heard of these options.

Later, Kathy was forced to deal with some inheritance issues stemming from her father’s declining health. While she was working through these issues, she attempted to open a new banking account only to discover that her name no longer matched the name associated with her social security number. No matter what she said or how much she protested, the bank refused to allow her to open an account.

I would like to say that this story has a happy ending. However, at the time of this writing, Kathy still had not resolved all her identity theft issues. She has yet to find out why her name no longer matches her number, and she continues to try to undo all the damage done to her credit.

My fear is that the identity thief is still on the loose and continuing to attack her identity. Kathy did pull a recent credit report and found many disturbing additions, including several different residences under many different aliases. These names are all similar to her real name, just slightly misspelled. She assumes that the person using her identification has somehow learned of her real name, possibly while talking to a debt collector, and is using information to continue attacking her identity.

Dealing with identity theft is something Kathy can do only in her spare time. Like many of us, she cannot just drop everything and focus all her attention on identity theft. In addition, before I spoke to Kathy, she had no idea what all her options were and what she could do to help protect herself and restore her identity. And that is the underlying problem. While everyone is talking about identity theft, most people don’t know what to do after they have become the next identity theft statistic. We’ll delve into these issues next.