I have been the victim of identity theft a couple of times. A year ago, someone opened an online bank account using my information. I am sure that information had been obtained through one of the many data breaches that have happened in recent years. This episode was easy to clear up. Just call the bank in question, tell them that it was fraudulent, and it’s a done deal. Identity theft is so common nowadays, it’s become routine.
That wasn’t always the case. About 25 years ago, I was the victim of identity theft. I had just divorced my first wife and I needed a car, seeing as how she had gotten most everything in the divorce. I went to a small used car dealer, and it turns out that they were a bit, shall we say, shady. The finance manager had a scam going- he would file finance paperwork for several cars using the information of customers and by cutting and pasting their signatures onto multiple sales contracts. He would then take the checks for the car sales that had never actually happened. Since the dealer hadn’t sold those cars, they never missed the checks. He was also making money on the side by selling people’s financial information.
You can complain to the credit reporting agencies, but their investigations are a joke. In the end, it took me about two years to clear my name.
I solved it by becoming a pro se litigant. I sued several collection agencies and one fairly largish bank- SunTrust. I wasn’t greedy about it. Each entity I sued, I settled out of court for a few hundred dollars and for removing the credit line from my record. The Suntrust people were vindictive. They reported the “forgiven” loan to the IRS as income, and I wound up having to pay the IRS about 8 thousand dollars in taxes on the income when they subsequently audited me. I tried telling the IRS that my identity had been stolen, but back then it was such a new crime that they didn’t believe me.
Years later, SunTrust and their lawyers turned out to be just as shady and I wound up suing them half a dozen times with the mortgage scandal that caused my bankruptcy. It’s why I won’t do business with Truist to this day, that being the bank that SunTrust morphed into.
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