My ongoing identity theft saga...

[Blackjack]

I've posted this on a few other forums, I thought I'd post it here too just so everyone here knows they can compare their experiences with me if anything similar happens to any of them.

On November 22nd, a notice from Bank of America arrived for me back home in California. It was to notify me that I was behind in my payments on my Visa card with them. I was a little surprised to hear about this. Though I have had a checking account with Bank of America for quite a while now, I don't remember ever applying for a Visa card with them. So then my mother went through the other things that had arrived for me since I'd been away and found a bill saying that I owed $2,500 for a cash advance made in Henderson, Nevada on September 8th.

Bank of America absolutely did not want to let me report the transaction as fraud. Their given reason being that it was a cash advance, therefore the card had to be present (and I am not 100% sure that is true if they go into the bank to do it, which they probably had to do in order to get that much money at once) and the card was allegedly activated from my own home phone number back in California on August 27th. They told me that it was obviously someone who lived in my house who did it so I should discuss it with anyone there who I suspected might have done it. When I told them that my mother had already filed a police report back home rather they wanted to acknowledge it as fraud themselves or not, they capitulated, though they warned me that now I'd have to help them prosecute whoever did it even if it were a family member. I told them "Yes, of course!" since I knew there was no way either my mother or my brother could have done it. I was still in California on September 8th and I saw both of them there that day, neither had time to sneak out to Nevada and back without me noticing they'd been gone. Then there are the facts that my mother was the one who brought this whole thing to my attention in the first place and I was helping my brother move back into the house on August 27th, meaning he couldn't have been there to intercept the card prior to that (if it was ever actually sent to me at all - there are a lot of big unanswered questions about the origin of the card, which I will go into more about shortly.)

Anyway, that last part about me helping my brother got mixed up. Once an investigator from the bank got put on the case, she began accusing my brother of having done it since she thought I had said he was helping me move, so naturally you'd assume he came across an old credit card of mine while he was moving my stuff and decided to start causing trouble - if that had indeed been the case. And I still don't know if this dumb lady has wrapped her head around the fact that it was actually the other way around yet, we've done our best to explain to her but she is just plain dense. She also kept demanding copies of the police report, which we tried to tell her would not be availabe for at least another week at that time (which is what the police themselves had told us), so then she would always want to know the report number. Over and over again. We must have given that stupid number to her at least tewnty times (doesn't Bank of America equip its fraud devision with paper and pens?) before we were finally able to get the complete report from the police station and fax her a copy. Meanwhile, the bank was supposed to mail me some forms for me to fill out. I gave them my address here in Austria and warned them it would take a little while. I reported the fraud on November the 23rd and the forms, once I finally got them, were postmarked December 13th. Yes, they want us to instaneously produce anything they need but it takes them three weeks to put an envelope in the mail. I bet any of you a dollar some moron tried to mail to Austria regular postage and it was sent back to them and then that's how long it took them to find out what went wrong and mail it again. While I was still waiting, another notice arrived for me back home saying that since I hadn't returned the forms quickly enough they were closing the case and handing the $2500 bill back to me. My mother totally lost it at this point and was asking friends of hers who'd had run-ins with incompetent banks in the past if there were any attorneys they could recommend when I finally got the forms on January 3rd. To the bank's credit, they didn't put up too much of a fight when I told them I'd just then finally got those stupid forms and signed them and already faxed them a copy of them with my signature on them. But... then, as though they hadn't given me enough reason to question their competence already, instead of taking the $2500 away they adjusted my balance in the worng direction, so now it says I owe $5000! I am now angrier with Bank of America than whoever did this. I talked to the fraud people again yesterday and they said they would hopefully have that corrected by Tuesday. We will see... In the mean time, I don't even want to know what all this has done to my credit score (still waiting for the credit report I ordered last week to find its way across the ocean.)

Nobody that I've talked to in the fraud division has been able to provide any details whatsoever about where this card came from. They say it the account was originally opened in September of 2003. I have no memory of ever applying for credit with Bank of America though I suppose there is the slight possibility that I did two years ago and then forgot about all about it. But that is a long, long shot. And even if I did, how long do you usually have to activate a card once you get it? They couldn't answer that for me. Nor could they explain why a new card would have been mailed to me when I had never activated the old card in the first place. I'm not sure a card even was mailed. The investigator asked me where I had seen the card last before all this happened and she had the hardest time understanding that I had never seen the card ever. But she insists that the card has to have been at my house and activated from there because my home phone number is what the caller ID recorded. Apparently this woman has never heard of VoIP before.

And now it turns out I'm not the only one. The exact same thing happened to the daughter of a friend of my mother's, who lives in the exact same town in California and has a checking account opened at the same Bank of America branch. A Bank of America Visa card she didn't even know she had was somehow activated from her home phone and then used in Las Vegas to make a large cash advance. Also in September. It'll be interesting to see what they have to say about this next time I talk to them, you'd think they should be looking for patterns like this if they plan to catch whoever is responsible, shouldn't they? Anyway, this woman and her daughter are both totally furious with Bank of America now as well and are planning to set up accounts with another bank. I will do the same once I'm back home.

More on this to come, I'm sure...

[orpheus]

I have problems like that,

only this time I had some one was making threats against against me and who has now managed to get my personal details (name/address) and is now threatening to sign me up to a number of indecent websites, including Illegal ones.

that's why i haven't been around a lot,

I have been told to keep my head down.

[Sheryl]

I'm sorry Blackjack that this is happening to you. Have you contacted the 3 different credit agencies to let them know your id has been stolen. This will stop any future attempts of folks trying to take a credit card or something out in your name. Also sinse you now say that it has happened again to the daughter of one of your mother's friend, I would guess someone in your hometown is dumpster diving for privy information.

I had my id stolen bout 4 years ago. It was a nightmare, but eventually got everything taken care of. I now shred anything with personal information before throwing in trash.

Find out where in Vegas if you can where the transactions were made and contact these places. Sometimes they have surveilance.

[orpheus]

ArnoldLayne wrote: Good God , someone you know ?


unfortunately not......but the fact that my home address is known is pretty scary.

[Blackjack]

Sheryl wrote: I'm sorry Blackjack that this is happening to you. Have you contacted the 3 different credit agencies to let them know your id has been stolen.
I've contacted TransUnion who said they would contact the other agencies, so the fraud alert is out. And Bank of America said the fraud occurred at a bank so they have to have whoever did it on videotape. But that apparently won't help me. I found two interesting articles which appeared in the Los Angeles Times recently:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... 245.column

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me ... 933.column

After everything they've put me through so far I'm almost 100% sure this is going to end with them deciding to close the case and hand the bill back to me. I'm going to warn them not to do this next time I talk to them. Might not be too early to contact an attorney and start getting my case together, either...

[orpheus]

SnoozeControl wrote: I have your home address, I saw it on the google map. Next time I come to England, I'll be stopping over.

Coo eee (waves)


:-3

Was that an attempt at humour? :yh_wait,

actually the flag is no where near where I live.

[orpheus]

SnoozeControl wrote: Yes, it was. Apparently not a very good one, though.:rolleyes:
its OK,

touchy subject at the moment.