Identity Theft

[23 Daves]

There's a marginally unpleasant and (for me) unique situation occurring in the 23 Daves household at the moment.  It started a couple of days ago when my wife noticed an invoice coming through the post for a Vodafone mobile phone account which neither she or I had ordered.  Quoted on the invoice was a bank account neither of us had opened either.

Following on from this, yesterday a really expensive mobile phone assigned to a completely different account with Orange arrived by recorded delivery to our house.  Again, neither of us had ordered it, although I do need a new mobile phone, and when I saw the package I thought it was a belated birthday gift from somebody and got quite excited.  That's probably what's pissed me off most about all this so far, if I'm being honest...

Invetably, it seems my wife's been the victim of identity theft (and by correlation, it's possible I am as well as we have a joint bank account).  It's something I've obviously heard a great deal about - most of it alarmist - but I've never met anyone who had actually suffered from it, despite many websites quoting that 1 in 4 members of the public get hit by it at some point.  My wife is now painstakingly informing the police, and phoning up various organisations and people we have direct debits with to make sure they're aware of the situation, and to keep an eye out for any suspicious activity.

The strangest aspect of all of this was the mobile phone being delivered to our own home - if somebody out there is engaging in fraud, why would they set up a bogus account just to send us some of the wares?  Was this an idiotic mistake on their part, or could there be some sort of vendetta going on (we had a long-standing war going on with our previous downstairs neighbours who were tens of thousands of pounds in debt to the landlord, and also regularly engaged in criminal activity)?

Anyway, please feel free to use this post to talk about any experiences you might have had of identity theft, or people posing as you, or your bank account being delved into by other hands, or funny money, or indeed anything vaguely related.  How did you resolve it?  Was it a colossal pain in the arse, or no issue at all? 

Oh, and the first person to add a tag stating "perhaps the phone was bought by one of the other Daves" will be punished in some way.

[Marty McFly]

Sorry Daves, the closest I've come to this is being emailed an invoice for a new sofa, instead of it being sent to firstname.lastname@emailprovider.com (the other person's email address) it came to firstnamelastname@emailprovider.com (my own virtually identical email address). So I actually had that person's address, and had it not been 200 miles away I could have gone round and stolen their sofa.

I also got another email last week, from a terribly nice woman, thanking me for 'a very special time in Wanaka.. I am so proud of you. Love Mum'. Same wrong address..

[Viero_Berlotti]

I recently had my bank account compromised. I noticed two payments come out from .com companies that I hadn't authorised, and after some further investigation it turns out they are subscriptions for porn sites.

If there is one thing you don't need to pay for it's porn. So I phoned up the bank and they were fine about it, they reversed the payments and cancelled my card and sent out a new one.

A month goes by and I notice on my statement that the same payments have come out again. So back on to the bank, and this time they are suspicious and they start asking me if there is anyone in my house that could be using my cards to subscribe to porn sites. So then I start to get paranoid, and I'm thinking about all the occasions I've used my card recently, and about who I've let in my house, about websites I've visited. Have they sucked my details through a tube into my computer?

Anyway after a couple of days of scratching my head I get another phone call from the bank and this time they've got to the bottom of it. The payments had been made using an old Electron card that I had about 2 to 3 years ago. I got rid of it and upgraded to a proper Visa debit card at the insistence of my bank, and I was only too willing as Electron wasn't accepted in all places.

I had presumed at the time, that the Electron card had automatically been cancelled when they upgraded it, but obviously not. So somewhere, 2 years after I had last used it, someone had got the details of this card and was able to make payments with it. The bank were very apologetic and refunded the payments back to me and finally cancelled the old Electron card.

I still can't work out how whoever it was got the details, but my theory is that they didn't physically have the card, which would have been an impossibility as I had destroyed it 2 years previously, but the details were on a database somewhere that had been illicitly sold on the black market. So if you have got an old card you don't use anymore, or have had one that you presumed had been cancelled because you upgraded to a new one, it's worth checking out.

[Rev]

I've had cards stolen from the post and my account emptied a couple of times, but chip & pin seems to have slowed down the chancers on that front.  That's not identity fraud, anyway, that's just people being cunts.

The one time I had my identity nicked was really, really poor, and I think I've mentioned it on here before.  Someone or other used my 'details' in order to buy a car, and the first I knew about it was when the police showed up at my door.  You want to think that there's some level of sophistication involved in these things, but it appears that the stupid bastard just had my surname, initial, and address, meaning that they had to take an (incorrect) guess at what my first name might be.  I had another visit from the rozzers and a phone call from the station concerned, with an assurance that I'd be told when it was all sorted out, but that was the last I heard of it.  The rogue probably got away with it.

The experience left me thinking that the whole thing seemed so easy that I'd be an idiot not to give it a crack at some point.  I'm sure the day will come eventually.

[23 Daves]

Funny you should say that, Rev, because a bit of closer investigation reveals this might not be identity theft like we originally thought.  The bank account details the person in question is using belong to some other woman in Bristol, whilst they're using my wife's name and address details.  I would have thought this would be spotted by most people as suspect immediately, but it would seem they're just doing tons of orders online using this fairly basic and dirty technique and seeing how many go through. 

The bank have assured us that when parties start trying to make deductions from the unrelated account which will have incorrect name and address information, it will be flagged up immediately.  They've also put both parties on fraud alert.

It does leave me wondering what the fraudster behind this activity thinks they're actually getting from it apart from a couple of mobile phone accounts that die after a month, but I suppose that's not my problem...

[Santa's Boyfriend]

I've had Nigerian Fraudsters impersonate me.  For all I know, they might still be doing it.

About 2 years ago I started getting emails from people asking me if the email they received was genuinely from me, along with a copy of the email.  The email in question was clearly a Nigerian Fraud scam, but it was quite surreal as they were actually pretending to be me.  They had obviously found my website, which has lots of artwork on it ( have a look if you want - beware though as it has naked ladies on it - www.bendickson.co.uk ), and had decided I must be selling lots of artwork.  So they emailed these people saying that I was selling art to the tune of 3 million a year, and needed a US bank account to put the funds in. 

It doesn't make any sense to me, of course.  Firstly, I've never sold a piece of art in my life (although I have tried - I'm just not much of a salesman, and prices of paintings are high).  Secondly, I really don't get the idea of needing to use someone's bank account in the US to sell to the US.  In a way it was quite complimentary that the fraudsters thought they could scam people into thinking my art was worth that much, but it did start to piss me off when email after email came to me asking if this was genuine.  (My real email address is on my site, which they included in their email.)  So of course I emailed each of them and told them what a 419 scam is, and that it is definitely not genuine.  I also pointed a few to 419-eater and told them to keep me posted if they decided to have some fun.  One guy who emailed was a very talented voiceover man, doing voices for radio comedy and cartoons in Los Angeles.  He sent an email back to the fraudsters accusing them of trying to scam him and got a reply which contained the line "may you be blessed by the spirit of the Lord", which really made me laugh.  They all liked my work too, which was nice.

It seems to have stopped now, but I do still get the occasional email.  I just hope nobody fell for it.