What to do: Stolen SS#

contact the credit reporting agencies and a) have your account flagged (meaning credit cannot be opened without verification of who you are) and b) have a "consumer's statement" added to your reports detailing this incident.

as for the credit agency, you'll have to prove to them the fraud in order to get this to go away. probably sign an affidavit or something similar-this happened to my dad a few years back.

good luck! it's definitely a PITA.

 

http://www.privacyrights.org/identity.htm

 

Send a letter to the big three credit companies and have them freeze your credit... You can open it up again if and when you need it for a very specific amount of time but it keeps things like this from happening as when your credit is checked, they can't check it... I locked mine a few years ago, have used my secret pin to open it up once, then locked it down again. Once you lock it, the creditors can't touch it, nobody can without your pin.. At that point in time, you can tell the Hospital to go find the real people and to leave you alone as they can't do anything after that.

 

Beware,....because it may not be what you ASSUME that it is. This exact same thing happened to me about 15 years ago. I was awakened by a telephone call from a hospital in Oklahoma saying that I owed them $800. I asked them what name and SSN they had on file and they read back MY name and number. I knew this was bogus. Long story short,....some guy with my same last name and FIRST initial had skipped out on his bill, so the hospital got in touch with a credit report service and simply had them pull up somebody with the same last name and first initial,....which just happened to be me,....and THAT is how they got my SSN. The hospital never had MY SSN on any of their original paperwork. I called the hospital back and said, "If you've got my SSN from the credit report then you obviously know my date of birth and that will obviously NOT match the records of your deadbeat patient." Sure enough, they checked and realized that I was not the guy they were looking for.

Bottom line,....nobody "stole" my SSN and I doubt that anybody "stole" your's either. They probably just got the wrong name from some credit report agency.

 

Meaning you can lock your credit report from companies that want to file a late payment and/or bad judgement?

Antony

 

I had it happen to me.

Supposed debts are eventually sold to collection agencies if the debt is a small one. I received dunning letters for years for a debt that wasn't mine. Each time I contacted the collection agency and asked them to provide proof, which never came. A couple of years later, apparently another agency bought the 'debt' and again I requested proof. This went on through a number of agencies and finally, I haven't been bothered in about 6 years.

By the way, none of this appeared on any of my credit reports. Just ask for proof; i.e. something with your signature etc. If they can't provide it, they can't prove it!

 

Murder.

 

That sucks. My wife had someone steal her credit card number online and it took some time to straighten out.

 

No you cannot do that. All a lock does is keep people from looking at the report, not reporting to it.