I received a letter (at my last address, not my current one) from a lender telling me that they are refusing the credit I applied for. Since I did not apply for credit, I called them and the application came in over the internet. Except for one item all the info they checked with me was correct. They refused to give me the incorrect information that was filled in on the application despite the fact that it was supposedly from me. I proceeded to get a copy of my credit report from the credit bureau listed in the letter to me. There I saw this inquiry listed, along with another one from another place. How serious is this? What should I do now????
Put a consumer statement on each credit report stating that you wish to be contacted at (insert your cell # here) prior to a credit inquiry being approved. Legit merchants (cell phone companies, car dealers, banks, etc) will honor this. You should also contact your local police department; identity theft is a criminal matter.
Exactly. Make sure you file a police report. You may need that in the future as proof. Call any of the three credit bureaus and put a fraud alert on your account. They will pass it to the other two (one of the few things they share, because it's the law) and then creditors will have to contact you before opening accounts.
Thank you so much for your responses. I hate to sound so stupid, but I'm an innocent law-abiding citizen. How do I file the police report....with the least amount of hassle?
That's not a stupid question at all. The best bet is to call your local police department's non-emergency contact number. Tell them you'd like to speak with an officer about a possible case of identity theft. The officer will take over from there. You won't be filling out a report on your own. Police officers deal with this sort of thing on a daily basis, including people who aren't sure how the system works. So don't worry about how to do it "properly"; they'll do all the heavy lifting for you. Nonetheless, identity theft is a serious and messy thing. If you haven't already done so, contact the credit reporting agencies (as in, right this second) and freeze your credit reports. Hey, lookie here: Creditnet just happens to have recently posted an article on this very subject! Can a Credit Freeze Prevent Identity Theft?
Thanks Sparq. Great informative report. Just wondering...when I freeze my credit report, if I want to apply for a credit card at a store, for example, how would I be able to do that? Or would it be impossible to get any new credit? Any idea?
You would not be able to apply for any type of credit unless you lift the freeze first. So, if the freeze is in place and you attempt to apply for a retail credit card, the credit issuer would not be able to pull and view your credit report.
I thought with freezes, you were assigned a pin, and with that pin you could temporarily lift the freeze so you could apply for credit. Did I dream that?
In my former employment, where we regularly dealt with people's credit, we often encountered a "consumer statement" that would prevent us from running credit. These statements contained language that would require our credit processor to contact the person at a number already listed in their credit report. If they reached the person there (usually their cell phone or home phone) and verified some basic information, we could go. Many times, consumers had to leave, wait for the call at home, then come back. I'm not sure if there's a better way to do it today, but it was effective and allowed for one-at-a-time bypasses.
