Identity theft is something you always assume happens to other people, but it can just take one slip-up to find yourself trapped in a murky financial nightmare.
products were pernicious because they encouraged consumers to load themselves up with too much debt. Now bitter personal experience has opened my eyes to what a financial bonanza they are for the criminal community.
I blithely thought that was the end of the matter, not realising that the same criminals had managed to hack into my hotmail account. I then made a massive blunder. My father passed away last September, and my sisters and I are in the process of selling his house. The real estate agent was pushing for ID, and I obligingly – and very stupidly – emailed him a photo of my driver’s licence.
Last Friday, I called up humm and spoke to an extremely efficient person at their call centre, who told me that humm had my driver’s licence details. Weirdly, the criminals had substituted my original credit card details with those of two other cards – presumably also stolen – and paid off the original loan which was just under $1000 ahead of schedule.The humm employee cheerfully informed me that because there was no money owing, my credit rating wouldn’t be affected.
And although the account was now locked, I received a second late payment notice from Openpay early on Saturday morning, which urged me to “please make your payment as soon as possible or you could be subject to debt collection”.
On Monday, I was unnerved to discover that the fraudsters had been approved for a $4000 loan from LatitudePay, which – remarkably – they hadn’t used.Not surprisingly, the mobile phone number that the fraudsters gave to LatitudePay was the same that had been provided to humm. Because, as the Openpay representative helpfully pointed out, it’s by no means certain that the criminals limited themselves to applying for loans from humm, LatitudePay and Openpay.
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