Identity Theft

I’ve been asked by several people to document my Identity Theft incident better.

Basically what happened, is that someone obtained enough information to forge checks on my checking account.  They have at the very least, both my and my husband’s DL number, probably Social Security numbers, addresss, and checking account number.

Here’s how I found out it happened.

I check all of my accounts daily.  I have Quicken set up download all of the accounts with my main accounts daily and I manually do other credit accounts at least twice a week, and I also check my cell phone account almost daily.  Yeah, anal, but that’s what alerted me.

On Thursday, I saw an transaction on my checking account I did not recognize.  It was a check for around 120.00.   I could not see what the transaction looked like until the image had been scanned and made available, so I did not know for sure until Friday as to what was going on.

It was obviously a check not written by me, it was to a business I would use a credit card at, not a check.  The handwritten was not mine, nor did the checks look like mine.

The first thing I did was to call Chase and ask what to do.  I had to go to a local branch and will out a “fraud packet”.  It wasn’t a packet already sitting and ready, but something a bank officer had to go through with me.  At the same time, they put an “alert” on the account.

Basically I had to fill out a form telling them what happened.  That’s where I described the three transactions we saw at that point.  Two more had gone through that day.

I also had to fill out another form, listing all the outstanding transactions. 

The good news, is that I had enough money in the account to cover all the transactions, mine and the fraudelent ones so nothing was bouncing.  That would have presented a lot more hassle.

The bank closed my old account and opened a new account, giving me free checks since we had just gotten new ones, and new debit card.

Note:  I should have taken a list of my outstanding transactions with me to the bank.  Do that if this happens.

My next step was to do a search on fraud alert credit account — I have to thank one of my coworkers at my school for reminding me of this problem.  I got to  http://www.fightidentitytheft.com/flag.html and followed their directions.  So far, we don’t have anything on our credit reports and I called the 1-800 number to put a fraud alert on our credit file.

One other thing you should do if you have a PayPal account is to change your banking account on PayPal.  I forgot to do that until a transaction came through and had to tell the payee what was going on.

That’s pretty easy to do, you just add the new account and delete the old one.

If I find anything else I forgot to do, I’ll document it here.