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I wish I had more upvotes to give you. Alas, I can give you only one. I was the victim of low-grade identity theft about 10 years ago, all stemming from a cred

I wish I had more upvotes to give you. Alas, I can give you only one. I was the victim of low-grade identity theft about 10 years ago, all stemming from a credit card number illicitly imprinted by someone at a restaurant. Shit spiraled from there, and it took me years to clean up the fallout. Dealing with the Big Three credit agencies was a process for which the word "Kafkaesque" somehow falls short of descriptive power. I've been caught in bureaucratic snafus at the DMV and the IRS, and in comparison, both of those processes were a walk in the park on a bright, sunny day. Our country is basically a consumerocracy, in which one's credit rating is more or less one's fate. If we're going to bestow that much power upon a three-member oligopoly, then we should demand much greater responsibility of its members.

driverdan 12y ago
> I was the victim of low-grade identity theft about 10 years ago, all stemming from a credit card number illicitly imprinted by someone at a restaurant. Shit spiraled from there, and it took me years to clean up the fallout. Can you explain this in more detail? I don't understand how a single stolen credit card can cause you years of problems.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  The thief made some small purchases that would have been comical if their consequences hadn't been so ridiculous and far reaching. For instance, he rented a video at Blockbuster (!) that he didn't return. Blockbuster attempted to contact "me" several times about the video, assessing various late fees, but never charging them to my card for some odd reason, until finally it sent a collections agency after me. This entire, petty drama went unbeknownst to me until it wound up on my credit rating. All over a fraudulently derived, $15 late fee at a freaking video rental place. Getting this incident wiped from my credit history took an elaborate and drawn-out series of phone calls, letters, forms, interviews, etc. Even then, a decent amount of damage had been done, and various reports had spawned other reports, and I was borked in countless derivative reports and company databases. I had to do some "rebuilding" (in the parlance of the credit companies) for a few years. And this was just one of several, roughly similar purchases that accrued in the system under my name. The irony is that a bolder thief, making bigger purchases and maxing out the card, would have caused less damage to me by catching everyone's attention in flagrante delicto.
  - driverdan 12y ago
    Thanks for clearing that up. Did he make a fake ID to open the Blockbuster account? It sounds like he had more than your credit card. If all he had was your card Blockbuster wouldn't be able to go after you, they wouldn't have the necessary ID information.
    - jonnathanson 12y ago
      No worries. To be honest, I'm not sure. All I can do is speculate. All I really know is that my credit card number was obtained and was used to make a few small purchases. Blockbuster was one of them. I didn't find out about Blockbuster -- or its attempts to go after me -- until I got a letter in the mail from a collections agency. That was the first I'd heard of anything involving Blockbuster. I put two and two together and realized it must have stemmed from the credit card theft, which had happened a few months prior, and which I'd assumed had been largely wrapped up by then. I figured that the collections agency hadn't just been called in overnight. No doubt it was the third or fourth step in some procedure at Blockbuster, starting with phone calls and letters, presumably to whatever falsified address and number this guy gave them. When it finally came time to involve collections, collections probably figured that I was some sort of deadbeat, and that "my" address on file with Blockbuster was bogus, and that at least the credit card number and bank were valid. So they found a way to contact me at my real address. (It's also possible they found me, at that point, through some ancient account on file with Blockbuster's system. Who's to say how sophisticated their dedupe practices were with their DB, but I'm guessing not very?) I have no idea what else was involved in the theft, above and beyond lifting my number. It's possible a fake ID was involved. I really can't say, and I don't want to overstep the bounds of my recollection.
- orclev 12y ago
  The short version is that the way the credit system in the US works is basically an echo chamber. That one stolen credit card racks up a bunch of fraudulent charges, those charges get recorded by one of the credit reporting agencies and then shared with the other two. Those credit reports then get used as the basis for all kinds of other reports at other companies all the way up to and including the IRS. You basically spend the next X years arguing from one company to the next to fix the records, but the records tend to propagate faster than you can get them fixed, because everyone references everyone else. Sadly at this point it would almost be simpler to concoct a new fake identity for yourself and get that entered in than it would be to fix your original corrupted identity.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    Exactly. If you happen to be lucky enough to catch somebody in the act, you can undo the damage pretty quickly, if not altogether painlessly. It'll take a huffy phone call to your credit card company, and some watchful waiting for a month or so afterward. You will get a new card, with a new number, and you'll have to set up new billing numbers for everything. A small, but sharp pain in the ass. [1] But if you don't catch things right away, and god forbid, if something winds up on your credit report, you are capital-F Fucked. By then it's too late, and your fraudulent data is commingled with your real data in dozens of databases, each one echoing off of the other. The bad data sprouts like kudzu. You can pluck a few shoots out of the ground, and five more pop up in unexpected places, weeks or months later. [1] You can also set up a proactive solution, like a super-sensitive, early-warning algo at your credit card company. But this net ends up snaring you half the time, like whenever you use your credit card to make small purchases, or buy gas, or out of state, etc. It gets a lot of false positives. My card gets blocked for "fraud" every few weeks, leading to minor headaches at restaurants, bars, and gas stations. But I guess I'll accept this hassle as the price I pay for advance warning of real fraud. At the same time, I'm concerned that this system is just as likely to run into false negatives, which would really suck.

driverdan 12y ago

> I was the victim of low-grade identity theft about 10 years ago, all stemming from a credit card number illicitly imprinted by someone at a restaurant. Shit spiraled from there, and it took me years to clean up the fallout. Can you explain this in more detail? I don't understand how a single stolen credit card can cause you years of problems.

jonnathanson 12y ago
The thief made some small purchases that would have been comical if their consequences hadn't been so ridiculous and far reaching. For instance, he rented a video at Blockbuster (!) that he didn't return. Blockbuster attempted to contact "me" several times about the video, assessing various late fees, but never charging them to my card for some odd reason, until finally it sent a collections agency after me. This entire, petty drama went unbeknownst to me until it wound up on my credit rating. All over a fraudulently derived, $15 late fee at a freaking video rental place. Getting this incident wiped from my credit history took an elaborate and drawn-out series of phone calls, letters, forms, interviews, etc. Even then, a decent amount of damage had been done, and various reports had spawned other reports, and I was borked in countless derivative reports and company databases. I had to do some "rebuilding" (in the parlance of the credit companies) for a few years. And this was just one of several, roughly similar purchases that accrued in the system under my name. The irony is that a bolder thief, making bigger purchases and maxing out the card, would have caused less damage to me by catching everyone's attention in flagrante delicto.
- driverdan 12y ago
  Thanks for clearing that up. Did he make a fake ID to open the Blockbuster account? It sounds like he had more than your credit card. If all he had was your card Blockbuster wouldn't be able to go after you, they wouldn't have the necessary ID information.
  - jonnathanson 12y ago
    No worries. To be honest, I'm not sure. All I can do is speculate. All I really know is that my credit card number was obtained and was used to make a few small purchases. Blockbuster was one of them. I didn't find out about Blockbuster -- or its attempts to go after me -- until I got a letter in the mail from a collections agency. That was the first I'd heard of anything involving Blockbuster. I put two and two together and realized it must have stemmed from the credit card theft, which had happened a few months prior, and which I'd assumed had been largely wrapped up by then. I figured that the collections agency hadn't just been called in overnight. No doubt it was the third or fourth step in some procedure at Blockbuster, starting with phone calls and letters, presumably to whatever falsified address and number this guy gave them. When it finally came time to involve collections, collections probably figured that I was some sort of deadbeat, and that "my" address on file with Blockbuster was bogus, and that at least the credit card number and bank were valid. So they found a way to contact me at my real address. (It's also possible they found me, at that point, through some ancient account on file with Blockbuster's system. Who's to say how sophisticated their dedupe practices were with their DB, but I'm guessing not very?) I have no idea what else was involved in the theft, above and beyond lifting my number. It's possible a fake ID was involved. I really can't say, and I don't want to overstep the bounds of my recollection.
orclev 12y ago
The short version is that the way the credit system in the US works is basically an echo chamber. That one stolen credit card racks up a bunch of fraudulent charges, those charges get recorded by one of the credit reporting agencies and then shared with the other two. Those credit reports then get used as the basis for all kinds of other reports at other companies all the way up to and including the IRS. You basically spend the next X years arguing from one company to the next to fix the records, but the records tend to propagate faster than you can get them fixed, because everyone references everyone else. Sadly at this point it would almost be simpler to concoct a new fake identity for yourself and get that entered in than it would be to fix your original corrupted identity.
- jonnathanson 12y ago
  Exactly. If you happen to be lucky enough to catch somebody in the act, you can undo the damage pretty quickly, if not altogether painlessly. It'll take a huffy phone call to your credit card company, and some watchful waiting for a month or so afterward. You will get a new card, with a new number, and you'll have to set up new billing numbers for everything. A small, but sharp pain in the ass. [1] But if you don't catch things right away, and god forbid, if something winds up on your credit report, you are capital-F Fucked. By then it's too late, and your fraudulent data is commingled with your real data in dozens of databases, each one echoing off of the other. The bad data sprouts like kudzu. You can pluck a few shoots out of the ground, and five more pop up in unexpected places, weeks or months later. [1] You can also set up a proactive solution, like a super-sensitive, early-warning algo at your credit card company. But this net ends up snaring you half the time, like whenever you use your credit card to make small purchases, or buy gas, or out of state, etc. It gets a lot of false positives. My card gets blocked for "fraud" every few weeks, leading to minor headaches at restaurants, bars, and gas stations. But I guess I'll accept this hassle as the price I pay for advance warning of real fraud. At the same time, I'm concerned that this system is just as likely to run into false negatives, which would really suck.