Well, I finally got hit with someone stealing my identity. UGH!
Friday, I got a couple of Hard Inquiry alerts that showed someone had used my name, SS, etc to apply for credit cards at Discover and Capital One. I have alerts set up through Chase, Amex and Credit Karma. Being the weekend, I was unable to contact Discover and Capital One until today. Both were very helpful and cancelled the applications and marked them both as fraud.
I immediately froze my credit agency accounts and also submitted a Fraud Alert at all three agencies to keep this from happening again (hopefully).
What was especially worrisome was I was surprised to learn was that I already had a Transunion account set up. Come to find out that someone else set up the account last month using my name and SSN but used their address, phone, security questions, etc. After a number of attempts with Transunion customer service, I was able to regain control of my account, change username, password, email, phone, etc.
So, what's to keep someone from calling back in and changing everything back? From a little research, this is a real problem. Some have reported that it's a constant game of cat and mouse. Once fraudsters have certain information from your credit report they can just basically call up (like I did) and recreate everything, turn off credit freezes, etc. Anybody else have their credit agency information compromised?
Friday, I got a couple of Hard Inquiry alerts that showed someone had used my name, SS, etc to apply for credit cards at Discover and Capital One. I have alerts set up through Chase, Amex and Credit Karma. Being the weekend, I was unable to contact Discover and Capital One until today. Both were very helpful and cancelled the applications and marked them both as fraud.
I immediately froze my credit agency accounts and also submitted a Fraud Alert at all three agencies to keep this from happening again (hopefully).
What was especially worrisome was I was surprised to learn was that I already had a Transunion account set up. Come to find out that someone else set up the account last month using my name and SSN but used their address, phone, security questions, etc. After a number of attempts with Transunion customer service, I was able to regain control of my account, change username, password, email, phone, etc.
So, what's to keep someone from calling back in and changing everything back? From a little research, this is a real problem. Some have reported that it's a constant game of cat and mouse. Once fraudsters have certain information from your credit report they can just basically call up (like I did) and recreate everything, turn off credit freezes, etc. Anybody else have their credit agency information compromised?