Identity Theft Happened to Me
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A few summers ago I got a call from my bank, which is a large regional bank in Florida and other southern states. The person on the line was calling from a branch in Georgia and she suspected my account had been hot by an identity thief.
Long story short – a woman had a false Georgia driver’s license with my name, address, and social security number on it, but her photo. She had hit three branches of my bank in Georgia that day to cash large checks against my account. That third transaction of the day had triggered an alarm in the system and the teller had asked the woman to step into an office. At that point, she fled.
Unfortunately, the system was not triggered when the woman hot my account the two prior days in another state, because she had only gone to two banks on each of those days.
In three day’s time, she had cashed over $10,000 in checks against my account. Somewhere, there is a woman with a license in my name. She had enough sensitive information about me and my account that the corporate security office for my bank felt like she must have obtained her information from an inside source. So, it is quite likely that the theft of my identity was not due to any lack of vigilance on my part. Nonetheless, it still happened to me.
In the end, my bank ate the loss. But, I was lucky. Identity theft is becoming more and more prevalent every day. In fact, this is the seventh straight year that identity theft made the top spot on the Federal Trade Commission’s complaint list. Over one-third of the FTC’s complaints have to do with identity theft. Many of the people who fall victim to this crime have nobody to back them up, like my bank did for me.
Preventative measures are your best defense. Services like Lifelock are a good deterrent. They are a sort of one stop shop. You could perform all of the tasks they do for you n your own, but it would eat up a substantial chunk of your time on a monthly basis. Instead, you can sign up for a cheap subscription plan to their services and have them do things like set up fraud alerts for your social security number, have your name taken off pre-approved and junk mail lists, order credit reports, cancel credit cards if your wallet is stolen, keep an eye out for networks selling your personal information, and even provide the means to hire an attorney if you do indeed find yourself a victim of ID theft and need to get your situation in order.
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