Daily Archives: February 19, 2016

Identity Thievery

good editorRight before the end of the year in 2014 my wife and I went shopping at a department store and took advantage of an after Christmas sale to get her a necklace. It wasn’t tremendously expensive (I think it was under 50 dollars) but when the clerk asked if we wanted to save fifteen additional percent by opening up a store credit card, we said sure.

And that was our mistake. We weren’t to learn about the mistake for many months, and we’re still paying for it.

An employee at the department store’s call center had a very similar name to my wife’s, which apparently led her to believe she could steal my wife’s identity. With my wife’s information this stranger proceeded to buy two new cars and then went on a credit card rampage, signing up for whatever she could lay hands on. I was a little confused when I started receiving phone calls during the day in early 2015 asking if we had opened credit cards, but they sounded so much like phishing attempts (they usually asked for our personal data) I didn’t think the people I was speaking with were real company representatives.