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Identity Theft Again

December 17th, 2018 at 03:55 am

The last several days have been pretty awful and not just because of my cold, although that was bad, too. My ears blocked up on the 12th and only cleared this morning. If I thought I was dizzy and the world was spinning before, every time I tried to pop my ears it also felt like I was on a sail boat in rough water. I have had spinning before, but never up and down dizziness. I had to just close my eyes and sit still for several minutes and wait for it to stop. It is nice to be able to hear properly again. I'm still not over this thing, but it is down to a runny nose now and tiredness now, which is a huge improvement.

The bad part, financially is two-fold. One, someone used DH's Best Buy account to order a laptop. They swamped his email with Russian subscriptions to try to hide the message from Best Buy, but DH has it set up so that certain emails always go to the top. It was ordered by some guy named Todd Peterson in Oregon. DH was able to cancel it and changed the password on his Best Buy account. They had charged it to a credit card number that looked familiar, but wasn't one of our current credit card numbers. I think it might have been one of our numbers before we were issued new cards with new numbers due to identity theft six months ago. If so, I'm not sure how he managed to even order it. Anyway, it got taken care of it, but it was worrying.

Then we found out DH's Paypal account had been hacked. Someone changed the main email on it to a different one, but left his as a secondary. They also changed the language to Spanish. They had also withdrawn $1000 from our checking account, which I normally would have caught much sooner, but I've been sick and doing the bare minimum with finances. Fortunately the money was still sitting there in his account and once he was able to get into it and change it back into English he deleted that foreign e-mail and changed his password, set it so his phone had to be texted for anything on the account could be changed again, and deleted all cards or checking accounts from Paypal.

I went on to Paypal for myself and everything looked fine for me. As with all instances of identity theft so far, they have had to do with DH's info. I changed my password just to be on the safe side and set it up with my phone to be texted if anyone tried to change anything and then DH transferred the $1000 to me and I transferred it back to our checking account. Hopefully it will be there on Monday. Fortunately we had enough money in the account to cover everything we had paid out. I will be making it a priority to be checking our checking accounts every few days now, even when I feel like death.

So while it was a major hassle, at least no money was permanently stolen from us. The third thing that happened is the new computer DH bought is not working after a week. He bought it directly from HP and it quit functioning a week in. He decided to do a reset to factory settings and it erased the drive. So he's been trying to get HP support, but they have very limited hours and no one is there on weekends. Seems like a poor way to run a business in this day and age. He is going to send it back and either get his money back or get a new one.

I am hoping they will just give him a new one. I was worried about him buying it from them direct instead of through Best Buy, where we at least have Geek Squad protection. Of course, that was before the Best Buy hack. He did it because he could get a better computer that way for the same money. Not better if it doesn't work.

I hope this is the last we see of this nonsense, but I realize we may very well be dealing with this for some time. Stupid companies that can't protect our information. That $1000 could have caused a world of hurt if we'd lost it.

4 Responses to “Identity Theft Again”

  1. Homebody Says:
    1545026039

    Omgoodness! So do you know how it happened or how the identity theft happened?

    We had two counterfeit forged checks from a checking account for just under $1000 each. We had enough to cover it, but we closed that account and opened another. I caught it because I looked at the checks trying to remember why I would have given my husband blank checks with my signatures. Then I realized those were not my signatures because I never go below the signature line, but otherwise, it looked very much like my handwriting. Oh and the font was different on the checks.

  2. creditcardfree Says:
    1545057363

    Wow! You are the second person online that I have heard of having been hacked or had charges against an account this week. Their desire this time of year is insatiable. Thanks for sharing so we can all be aware of our accounts.

  3. LuckyRobin Says:
    1545093953

    CCF--One of DH's friends from work had their paypal hacked, too. That's why DH went and looked.

  4. LuckyRobin Says:
    1545094112

    Homebody--We don't know for sure, but we think it was related to the same data breach about around six months ago, where one of the credit card numbers was used. That was when we changed the numbers on our cards. The fraud alert on our credit report would have gone off at the beginning of the month. We'll have to do a new one for DH.

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