Coffee heat rising

Identity Theft Aftermath…arggghhhhh!

Or, one might say, gaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

“You may continue to hold, and a representative will be with you as soon as possible”…blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat …

Spent an hour chatting, in person, with the assistant manager at the credit union about the annoying community college district’s having blithely handed over every goddamn iota of my personal financial information to identity thieves. She knew whereof I spoke, in spades: incredibly, the District had sent her the same apocalyptic message I got, but she has never had anything to do with any of their colleges or with anything else related to their entity in her ENTIRE LIFE.

It begins to get hilarious.

Given the hard-copy message, whose credibility we cannot assess under the ridiculous circumstances, we decide that the most prudent course is to assume that the data has been hacked, rather than to take a chance on making the opposite assumption and regret it later. Since my accounts there only hold about 13 grand (the entire amount of my 2014 living expense needs), if money is siphoned off, then the CU (read “FDIC”) will cover it as long as I clue them within 60 days of an illegitimate transaction.

We confirm that it’s possible to create a new account for me within the credit union without my having to lift the security freezes now in place at all three major credit bureaus (Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion).

So, Assistant Manager Renée, a very nice lady and wondrously together, says that now that we’ve changed the account number, effectively closing my account and opening a new one in ONE swell foop, I need to call every merchant that engrosses money from my account automatically (that would be all the utility companies plus my long-term care insurer) and clue them to the new account number; and forthwith I must get ahold of Social Security and give them the new account number, since they deposit my Social Security payment digitally.

So first off I call Social Security. …blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat blat … “Your estimated time is…

1 hour and 15 minutes

Moving on…

City of Phoenix Water Services: “We’ll send you a form.”

Southwest Gas: “We’ll send you a form.”

Salt River Project (electricity provider): CSR takes routing and account info but has a difficult time understanding that the credit union will post this month’s bill even though there’s no way SRP can get its act together in time to apply the new account number to this month’s bill. He thinks I’ll have to pay this month’s bill with a check.

Metlife: HOLY mackerel! Straightaway I reach a human being and she has good sense. Or at least she seems to. She takes the new information and the old routing number and says all will proceed without a hitch. That’ll be the day, I think. Privately.

Cox is paid a set figure through bill-pay. I’ll have to go into the new account and reset the bill-pay info.

And as for the accursed community college district, which caused this whole mess and which has shared my bank account information with the entire fucking universe: I told them to send whatever further paychecks they emanate by snail-mail. You can be sure that outfit will never get its corporate paws on another bank account number of mine.

This will add a significant new layer of hassle, since depositing snail-mail checks is a major pain in the proverbial ass. But it’s one helluva lot less of a pain than the present endless series of hoop-jumps.

Tomorrow I’ll have to DRIVE TO THE GODDAMN SOCIAL SECURITY OFFICE, be sure my stupid little pen-knife is NOT in my purse, trudge in there, wait around for half an hour or more, and then try to make a face-to-face CSR understand a) what’s happened, and b) what needs to happen.

By and large, however, experience suggests the face-to-face CSRs are a lot smarter and a lot more knowledgeable than the phone representatives, who routinely dispense incorrect information. That notwithstanding, however, based on the outcomes of past exploits it is reasonable to expect that I will miss at least one Social Security payment and so within a few weeks will end up back at that office doing battle again.

ogodogodogodogod it’s not good to know too much

16 thoughts on “Identity Theft Aftermath…arggghhhhh!”

  1. This just reinforces my decision to *not* sign up for auto-bill-pay wherever possible. Currently the only thing that is automatically hooked to my bank account is my direct deposit paycheque.

    Utilities (cable/internet and gas/electricity) get paid manually by yours truly every month, with 2 minutes logging in online to their site and entering my information each time. Mortgage is a manual transaction every month – mortgage is at my bank, so it’s a matter of transferring funds. HOA payment gets a cheque written and posted to the mail every month, since they don’t offer an online option – the only other option is the auto pay withdrawal from my bank account – no thank you.

    Mostly my dislike of the automatic withdrawals is that for a long time many years ago, payroll was NOT automatic, so having money come out of my account every month on a scheduled basis was *not* a good idea. Times have changed, but I’m still against it 🙂

    • There’s something to all that, for sure!!

      The direct deposit is what has me set off: if I hadn’t given the District the bank’s routing number and my account number, the fact that they stole my Social Security number, birthdate, name, address, phone numbers and on and on and on would seem a great deal less urgent. Eventually they can and may make trouble. But that they can get into my bank account whenever they please? Uhmmm…that, we need to do something about!

      Meanwhile, it’s beginning to appear that almost everyone in the county is getting “The Letter,” including people whose contact with the college district dates back to the 1980s and even those who never had any dealings with that outfit at all. It gets stupider and stupider.

    • Maybe I’m missing something, but I’ve never considered my routing number and bank account number to be super secret – I don’t advertise them, but they are on the bottom of every check I write, so how secret can they really be?

  2. Aaaaand this the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night. What bothers me most is the time lapse before letting everyone know the system has been violated. Which is why I decline to set up any “automatic” payments of any type. I go online and pay be CC AND chuckle when the prompt comes up …”you can automatically set up payments…”. No thank you…

  3. Sometimes I think I’m being over-paranoid about protecting my personal information, and then I read something like this and realize I’m not being paranoid enough. What a world.

    • In the paranoia department, this thing is rapidly taking on a demented life of its own. Apparently the District is sending out The Letter to virtually everyone in the county.

      In addition to the credit union’s assistant manager, almost everyone I’ve mentioned this to says they’ve also received the Letter. SDXB got one yesterday — the last time he had any contact with an MCCD college was in 1980! Another friend said approximately the same, and this morning I opened what I assumed was more correspondence to me from the District and found — yes — another copy of The Letter, addressed to someone who had lived here before Satan and Proserpine!. S & P lived in this house for seven years and I’ve been here for nine or ten years…so we’re talkin’ records that are at least 16 or 17 years old.

      Think of what that implies… Holy sh!t.

  4. Things like this are why I hate having my account numbers and ss # out there for the world to grab. Using a fake ss# is sounding like a good idea for future stupid accounts. I keep forgetting that I worked with a man who did insurance on the side and it was found out he took money for premiums and instead put it in accounts under other peoples SS#’s. Clearly, short-sighted of me.
    There are now so many hacked files out in the ether how can we be sure who we are or how many of us there are and why don’t they ever help me shovel my driveway in 3 degree weather!!
    I hope nothing comes of it and it was done by some “for fun, to see if they could” group or person.

    • Dunno. It may be illegal to lie about your SS number, especially to a financial institution or to an employer who has to file tax reports. Employers are now required, thanks to our jingoistic brethren, to check each and every applicant for citizenship — offering a fake number might come under the heading of fraud.

      Am finding that putting a security freeze on your credit bureau accounts has all sorts of unexpected consequences, most of which, while they introduce an extra layer of hassle, probably help to protect you from further theft & fraud.

      We know that the perps were not in see-if-they-could mode. The FBI found employees’ data for sale on a website. That’s what let the cat out of the bag.

    • Yes, I agree it may be illegal to knowingly give a false SS# to employers [who send reports on earnings to the gov’ment] and banks [who do the same], but I am not sure it is required by the stores I buy at or other places like that, where I am old enough to know they did not in the past.
      I would almost be happy to give you my info and let you traverse the maze that I found in working with the big 3 credit bureaus – you did such a good job and actually got to talk to a real person!!
      And I really said it was starting to sound good not that I would 😉

  5. A couple thoughts…
    (1) The FDIC insures deposits at banks and thrift institutions, but not credit unions.
    (2) If you use a fake Tax ID/SSN to open a bank account that earns interest, you would most likely find yourself placed into backup withholding by the IRS because the account would trigger a TIN mismatch in the system. It seems like there are some other ant-terrorism/money laundering regulations that come into play here as well, but I cannot think of them off the top of my head.

    • Come on, folks!
      I worked in payroll many moons ago. One should not give a fake ssn to your employer or a bank, or I’d guess your stock broker. Those places that report on earnings to the government and let the IRS know how much to take or occasionally give back.
      However, many places ask for one that do not need it, and I feel that I should follow the advice that is often offered on the news and has been for a decade or more and NOT give out my SSN when it is not needed.

    • Oh yeah…you’re right! A different agency insures credit-union accounts: the National Credit Union Insurance Fund (NCUIF), which is run by the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA). I’d forgotten about that!

    • @ tiredofthemall: Right on: I emit disinformation when merchants ask me for factoids that are none of their business. Safeway, for example, thinks it’s selling groceries to my deceased German shepherd and that her phone number is the same as their local corporate offices.

      If you want to open a store credit account, though, I think they need your SS number to run a credit check. However…I refuse to open those. If they won’t take my AMEX or MasterCard, I just don’t do business with them. There’s a limit to how many pieces of plastic I should have to carry around.

      Where those accursed cards and “give us your private information for a (spurious) discount” scams are concerned, lately I’ve taken to quietly explaining to the hapless clerk, as politely as possible, that I don’t share my private information to get a few cents off and I resent being asked to lie to get a fair price on the merchandise. Maybe someday a manager will overhear…

  6. Sorry to hear about your identity theft and credit union problems. While autopay is very handy, it can leave you open to the hassles you have encountered. The only things that have auto-access to our bank account are auto-deposit from work, and autopay to both the water company and the gas & electric company. The mortgage was on autopay, but that has been paid off.

    • Your gas & electric are together? That’s convenient: one fewer bill to have to juggle. We have separate suppliers here.

      That actually i about all I’ve got on there. As I recall, the long-term care insurer required autopay, and of course I have no mortgage. It’s Cox, water, gas, electric, long-term care premiums outgoing; Social Security, the offending community college district, and occasional Fidelity deposits incoming. Cox, though, is paid through bill-pay, so that’s something I can fix from my end, rather than having to jump through hoops to get new information to people who don’t answer the phone. I don’t have to deal with cable or satellite TV, a cell phone, a mortgage, or car payments…thank heaven for small mercies!

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