A while back my girlfriend had noticed she received confirmation for signing up for a new credit card, but the credit card was not in the envelope and she figured it was just some sort of spam pre-approval mailer. A month later she ended up with her first bill for that very credit card she had never received, and called immediately to cancel this credit card and told the bank that she had never signed up for that and everything seemed to be cleared up and the bank agreed with that. Then about a month later she found out the bank had re-issued the card at “her request” and the person was using the credit card once again after she had already been assured that everything had been taken care of. She is now being called at least 3-4 times a day by this company asking to pay the balance that was racked up on this credit card which is frustrating.
The first thing we have done now since then is place a fraud alert on her account by contacting TransUnion and letting them know that we believed she was a victim of identity theft based on a credit card that was taken out in her name. TransUnion is obligated to tell the other two credit reporting agencies, and this alert will last for 90 days until it needs to be renewed to at least let them know their is suspicious activity on the account.
The next step was filing a dispute online with all three credit bureaus: TransUnion, Experian, Equifax. We figured this would be easier and less time consuming (plus save some money!) than mailing in a certified letter first. I’ve also read that filing an online dispute sometimes works even faster with the credit bureaus just deleting the account off your report within the 30 days if the bank can’t prove it was you. Obviously having a paper trail would be the optimal solution, but let’s hope the system can work as it’s supposed to.
We also contacted the bank which had a specific number to deal with fraud and tried to reason with them as to why would anyone take a credit card out, cancel it, and then open the account again right away? That right there screams fraud but the bank wanted to nothing to do with it. They actually just forwarded us to the collections department to have them harass for payment again. We decided to mail in a letter to the bank, similar to the dispute that we sent to the credit bureaus online using this template with some tweaks for the situation.
Looking bad, everything probably should have been in writing with a dispute to the company’s fraud department right away. We also probably should have looked into doing a credit freeze or something of the sort, but I know those can be a pain to deal with so my girlfriend was trying to avoid that. She’s signed up for free credit monitoring thanks to Target and uses Credit Karma as well and has not seen any other suspicious activity except for this card since then. Hopefully the disputes will work and this problem will go away as soon as possible!
Has anyone else ever experienced anything similar to this? Is our strategy a good one or does anyone have any other advice?
photo credit: elycefeliz via photopin cc
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