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Am I a victim of credit fraud/identity theft?
Ledneh
shinesquawkRegistered User regular
shinesquawkRegistered User regular
Three weeks ago I financed a new car. Naturally this involved the dealer contacting various banks to secure financing; I therefore expected to receive a rejection notice or two.
I got one two days ago that has scared the living daylights out of me, though. It's from Capital One Auto Finance, and they have stated that the reason for my rejection is that I A) have too many delinquent past or present Capital One credit obligations, and/or
have exceeded the credit limit on one or more Capital One accounts.
The problem? I have never in my entire life worked with or even contacted Capital One. For that matter, I'm very diligent about paying my bills and staying well below limits. So either A) someone's opened fraudulent accounts under my name, or someone there made a big mistake (and maybe costed me money; maybe I could have got a better APR from them?).
The steps I've taken so far:
- Received reports from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. All three still show my old auto loan as active, even though it closed two weeks ago, so these were no help.
- Contacted all the Capital One departments I can think of: credit cards, personal loans, first mortgage, and of course auto loans. None could find any accounts under my name or social. I was given an address to write to for more information, which I am in the process of doing. But this will take time, and if I'm a fraud victim, time is against me.
- Contacted the dealer; he's looking for more information as we speak.
The only thing I can think of right now is to place a fraud alert on my credit reports; however, since I don't KNOW yet that there has been a fraud attempt on my name, I fear that might be overkill (and may even negatively impact my credit).
So what I bring to you is this: has this happened to anyone before? What turned out to be the cause? Am I forgetting any steps in the process to protect myself? Put bluntly, am I fucked?
I got one two days ago that has scared the living daylights out of me, though. It's from Capital One Auto Finance, and they have stated that the reason for my rejection is that I A) have too many delinquent past or present Capital One credit obligations, and/or
have exceeded the credit limit on one or more Capital One accounts.The problem? I have never in my entire life worked with or even contacted Capital One. For that matter, I'm very diligent about paying my bills and staying well below limits. So either A) someone's opened fraudulent accounts under my name, or
someone there made a big mistake (and maybe costed me money; maybe I could have got a better APR from them?).The steps I've taken so far:
- Received reports from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. All three still show my old auto loan as active, even though it closed two weeks ago, so these were no help.
- Contacted all the Capital One departments I can think of: credit cards, personal loans, first mortgage, and of course auto loans. None could find any accounts under my name or social. I was given an address to write to for more information, which I am in the process of doing. But this will take time, and if I'm a fraud victim, time is against me.
- Contacted the dealer; he's looking for more information as we speak.
The only thing I can think of right now is to place a fraud alert on my credit reports; however, since I don't KNOW yet that there has been a fraud attempt on my name, I fear that might be overkill (and may even negatively impact my credit).
So what I bring to you is this: has this happened to anyone before? What turned out to be the cause? Am I forgetting any steps in the process to protect myself? Put bluntly, am I fucked?
Ledneh on
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If there's no Capital One credit accounts on your credit reports, and they can't find any accounts under your name or social, I think you should be fine. Hopefully the department you're writing to can give you more information about it, but it's most likely a mistake. Could be as simple as them printing the wrong form-letter template for your rejection notice.
Is there a contact number directly on the rejection letter? If so, have you called them directly rather than calling around to any other credit departments?
Have you exceeded the credit limit or been delinquent on some other accounts? It's possible that you had a card with someone else that was then purchased by Capital One and hasn't been fully integrated yet.
I know I'm not delinquent or excessive on any cards or loans or anything at all, anywhere. I'm anal and paranoid about that, which is why this came as a shock.
And while the credit reporting agencies didn't show anything, that doesn't necessarily help me because they still showed my old auto loan as active, when it was closed by Honda two weeks ago, indicating that my reports are out of date (how often do Experian etc update these things, anyway?)
If everything on there looks correct, it was probably an error on their part looking up your records (like the transposed number thing people mentioned) and it wasn't identity theft.
If things don't look correct and there are accounts listed that you've never heard of, addresses you've never lived at, phone numbers you've never had, then yes, that would be identity theft.
For someone with a good credit history, like you seem to have, that strikes me as a pretty high rate. Also 60 months is a pretty long car loan.
But we're getting sidetracked here. The dealer just called me and says he has no information for me, except to tell me to do everything I've already done. So now I guess all I can do is send that letter off, wait, and pray something horrible hasn't happened.
You could get a free trial of a credit monitoring service (or pay for one). I recently just did the free trial of Free Credit Report, and you can check your credit report as often as you want so you'll be able to keep an eye on your credit report to make sure nothing unusual shows up that hasn't currently show up on your report. But really, based on all the credit departments at Capital One not being able to find you by name or social in their system, I'd really chalk this up to an error on someone's part, either in putting in the wrong social or in sending the wrong rejection letter.
Though you said it didn't have a telephone number, there was probably a case number you can use as a reference when you speak to the department that handels these forms.
See if they can spot the discrepancy between your information and the one that belongs to the account.
I would avoid using freecreditreport.com unless you know you're going to want to pay for the service. I have found them to be a bit shady, to say the least, although there's no one thing I can point to here.. just some little things that might have been avoided if I'd just made sure there wasn't any funny business with canceling in the first place.
For one, you need to put in your payment information for the free trial. If you decide you don't want to pay for the service, you MUST go back to the site or call their number or pee in your cereal or whatever they want you to do in order to cancel or you get automatically upgraded to their shittiest plan when the trial is up.
There *were* hidden fees, and when I called about them customer service was terrible. I told them I never said I'd pay them anything, the response was "Then you shouldn't have put in payment info." I said I wanted to cancel, they told me it wasn't possible for a number of months because of.. I don't remember, but it was the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
So I reported it to my bank's fraud department, and they issued me a new card with a new number. I ended up getting about $200 back through them, all told. With the old card destroyed FCR could cram it because they wouldn't be able to charge it, and I never dealt with them again.
The end.
The moral of the story is: Use the government's free annual service if you want a full credit report. It will be more complete and accurate than FCR's anyway.
Yes, but if he wants to keep an eye on his report, he needs to go to a credit reporting service that will let him continuously check, rather than once a year.
Free Credit Report was just the first that came to mind because I used their free trial about 6 months ago (and didn't have any problems canceling). There are certainly other credit report websites that he can sign up to instead if he doesn't want to use the free credit report site of course.
That is the official FTC authorized website for getting a free annual credit report. Once you are getting your reports from each of the three credit agencies, you have the option to pick up any one of their credit reporting services (where you can pay to get things like more frequent reports, unlimited reports, alerts, etc.). This neatly avoids scammy middlemen.
Be careful with this. Some monitoring sites are considered "hard hits." Which will adversely impact your credit if done frequently.
Hmm... do you know some examples? I'd never heard of a credit monitoring site being considered a hard hit, since they're checking your credit report for you/in your name, and checking your own credit report doesn't affect your credit score.
This was a while back, but I remember a lot of those credit sites that started appearing were doing this. That might have largely been a red herring.