Mowed down
Yesterday was weird. First, I get a phone call telling me that I’m delinquent on a cell-phone bill. I don’t own a cell phone. I wouldn’t carry one if you gave it to me. Someone stole my personal information, and applied for credit in my name. My identity has been stolen. Now, I’ve got to deal with all the paperwork and forms. It shouldn’t be a major problem to resolve, though. Someone attempted to do this a while ago, and I had my credit reports flagged with a fraud alert. This time though, they did manage to get it through.
I’ve been telling lots of stories lately. One of them is about waking up one Saturday morning to a guy mowing my lawn. My wife (now ex) looked out the window and asked, “Why is that strange guy mowing our lawn?”
He was mowing my lawn because he had no money; Dewayne wanted me to do publicity photos for his band. He saw that I had an overgrown jungle out front, and hoped that I would trade my skill for his. He didn’t ask me beforehand, he just did it. It’s the kind of guy Dewayne was. Now I find out he’s getting mowed down too.
I know both of these guys; there are Lanny Ray stories to be told too. But not today. I don’t have the stomach for it.
A year ago my purse was stolen and the thief went on a spending spree with my checkbook, before I was able to cancel everything properly. So good luck sorting everything out – it can be very time consuming to make sure you have covered all bases in cases of identity theft. You might want to consider notifying the FTC, I understand they are putting together a database of fraud cases.
http://www.consumer.gov/idtheft/
sounds like a godawful day, jeff! my sympathies.
just to make it worse, here’s a sci-fi-ish (i.e., paranoid) question, which yr problem reminded me of: what if identity theft is a gubment plot to motivate jo(e) citizen to divulge all her/his identity info to data bases such as ftc? i guess it’s obtainable w/o yr permission or complicity, anyway, so perhaps don’t worry about it by now, not too much; the horse is out of the barn & cannot be got back in. but, yes, i sometimes do the odd vanity search (my name is odd) & wonder if that person who’s listed in the online court cases file with my name maybe didn’t steal my name? it’s a little discomfiting, you know … like, is the other shoe going to drop, or what? when?
until that fateful day when i finally decide to apply for a credit card or a house loan or something (i do cell phones, i’ll admit that), i shan’t worry myself too much about identity theft, but in your case, good luck with rooting out the a*hole who did it, or at least putting a stop to it. nasty, nasty business.
p.s. something nice: i enjoyed yr rbt pollan bit on the herb: en excelsias sativa (i’m **sure** my spelling is bad — altho’ i’m quite linear at the moment).
oh dear 🙁