Identity theft?
"Assuming you live in the US, it is quite normal when you are applying for a loan that the application will ask you to confirm your identity. One of these methods is to ask you which of the following addresses you have lived at, with some of them being very similar (i.e. same city, or maybe even the same street). Sometimes they will ask questions and your answer would be ""None of the above."" This is done to prevent fraudsters from applying for a loan under your identity. If you see no signs of unauthorized accounts or activities on your credit reports, and you initiated the car loan application, then you should be fine."
If anyone hasn't done this yet, all three companies have waived the fees. I just did it and a couple weeks ago, I set up an account with the Social Security Administration where you can get notified any time someone is trying to use your social security number. There's two-step authentication as well. Recovering after a card number has been stolen is a nuisance; you need to wade through determining which charges are and aren't legit, update the records of anyone who legitimately has your card on file, not have the card available until the replacement reaches you,  etc. And you may be on the hook for the first $50 of the loss, if I remember correctly, unless (as mentioned) the bank waives that. Plus the risk that the card could be the first step in a larger identity theft attempt. And not everyone is so blase' about the bank losing money. Those costs get passed on to us, remember. And some of us actually respect our banks or credit unions. Certainly cards come with some consumer protection, otherwise nobody who thought about this would want to use them. But it's still worth exercising reasonable care to keep the problem from arising. Since we seem to be discussing credit score and credit history interchangeably, if I can add credit report as the third part of the puzzle, I have another point. Your credit score and credit report can be effective tools to notice identity theft or fraud in your name.   Keeping track of your report will allow you to not only protect your good name (which is apparently in dispute here) but also those businesses who ultimately end up paying for the stolen goods or services. What can I do to make sure it won't happen? Who is the right person to report this to? (apparently, the police can't make sure that it won't be used for identity theft) You want to contact any one of the credit bureaus and put a fraud alert on your account.   Once you contact one, they automatically contact the other bureaus for you. As part of this, they should send you a credit report.  Review it carefully and note any items that are not yours.  You'll then need to dispute any items that are a result of this identity theft.   You may be required to file a police report regarding the stolen identity, but if you filed one for your stolen wallet, that may be sufficient.   If the person who stole your wallet wants to steal your identity, it may be months before it shows up on your credit report.   Make it a practice to regularly check your credit reports. How do I check at any given time whether my identity was stolen? Unfortunately, there is no easy way to check if your identity was stolen.  The most common way is to check your credit report, but that only checks things that are reported to the credit reporting bureaus.   If they use your information to start an account with a utility company at a rental house that typically won't go on your credit report until they are substantially delinquent.  If they use your information to check into a hospital, that information typically won't show up on your credit report until the hospital sends the bill to collections. I've had a case where the identity theft happened at Chase, but was never reported on my credit.   So my credit report was clear, but Chase disallowed me from banking with them because the identity thief had delinquent accounts with Chase that for whatever reason were not reported to the bureaus. How likely is it that it will be used in any form of identity theft? My gut feeling is that someone who snatches a wallet and immediately runs up the credit cards isn't looking to steal identities, but rather for a quick score.   I don't know if there are statistics that back up my hunch. Your right. The argument is, it's already dickered, so now we need to come up with something better. National ID is what's on the table. SSN has been used that way because there was a need for a national ID but everyone opposed it so vehemently and it bit us in the ass. Now here we are with a mass ID theft because we didn't address the problem when we should have. People had their identity stolen all the time prior to Equifax.  How, exactly, does she plan to prove this their fault?  Yes, there was a 15% increase in fraud from norms in August, but how do you prove their data caused your loss? The sting here is definitely in the tail, the PS that says We are starting to call you from the same day when we get your details. The initial email doesn't ask for details, it asks for commitment. Once committed, you will be more relaxed about providing details. This makes me think that this is more serious than a simple financial scam. This is an effort to steal your identity, and that could be much more serious than the one-off loss of a few thousand dollars. Here's why: 1. The scammer could get numerous credit cards and store cards in your name, run up thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges, and leave you stuck with explaining what happened. I know someone who went from being a multi-millionaire to a pauper in a few months when his identity was stolen - and he is no fool. 2. It will take you years to clear your name. Meanwhile, your credit is shot, and you might have trouble getting a job, renting an apartment, or simply getting a cellphone contract. 3. Once you've repaired your credit, the scammer can just go through his old files and do it all over again. 4. Cloaked in your identity, and therefore being seen as you, the scammer can pull any number of scams, for which you will eventually be blamed. Then as well as dealing with credit bureaus, you will be dealing with another, more serious bureau: the FBI. "I agree it seems insulting to pay the credit reporting agencies, but I have no choice at this point. I'd rather pay the small fee per each of them, to freeze accounts, then have thousands stolen. My husband has excellent credit and also we have a rather substantial savings account, that his info could give ""would be"" identity thieves access too.  This whole situation is messed up, and unacceptable! For one, no one EVER gave these credit reporting agencies access to their info, it's just a ""give in"" being born here. And for two, no one asked for their information to be kept in insecure databases. Higher standards need to be implemented.  My poor 72 year old father is outraged when I tell him his info is online. He says, ""I don't use the Internet!!! How can it be there?!?!"" (Poor old soul lol)  I just said, ""well dad, it is, whether you use it, or like it or not. It's there""  I just need to make sure we are taking the correct steps to protect ourselves. Honestly, I am not finance savvy. This is why I'm asking here in this sub. Thank you for responding, and thanks to anyone else who may offer any advice.  I'm not terrified, but I'm definitely miffed..." I'd be interested in seeing a source regarding the transposing of signatures onto different documents.  That's blatant criminal fraud without even falling into a grey area.  About math, a study ran in the Economist showed that people who were bad at relatively basic math (understanding fractions, interest, percentages) were far more likely to have requested loans they could not afford. "The whole process was so absurd though.   They asked me to scan and submit my ID (which I did). Then they told me they couldn't accept it because it wasn't real and was ""obviously downloaded from the internet."" (lolwut.) I've never been so casually accused of identity theft before- that was interesting. So I took a picture of me holding the ID and sent that instead. Susan (the woman I was speaking with (dunno why I still remember that name)) said for ""security reasons"" I would have to wait three months and try again.   Three months later they didn't even ask for ID." "Any time someone starts asking you to provide personal information, such as a birth date, it could very well be a scam.  This is especially true if it's someone you don't even know.  Be very careful about getting involved in such situations. There is always some kind of almost believable story to what the scammers tell you, and unless you're willing to look deeper into it then it's easy to get pulled in.  On top of that, you have to ask yourself, ""why did they pick me for this?"", because that's the real question.   You have no idea what else the software they're asking you to download might do that you wouldn't know about, but offering to pay you something is a good way for them to get you to bypass your own security by installing it yourself.  If the offer sounds too good to be true or too easy, you have to question it, and in such cases, your best bet is to stay away from it altogether." So your argument for a national ID is that we're already fucked so might as well add another data point?  There's other ways to solve this problem that doesn't introduce more privacy concerns... advocating against a national ID is not the same as advocating for using an SSN as an ID. The main issue is that anonymous payment is strongly opposed by banking and governments. The price of giving away your identity to hundreds of strangers daily is much higher than coping with stupid ads. Even the price of having your bank know your spending patterns so tightly, is high. Although it is strange, there is little risk. The first four numbers are just the card type (Visa, Master, etc.), and the last four alone don't give them much - there are still 8 digits missing that they do not have. There is nothing much they can do with that info, especially without the PIN and the CCV, so as I said, little risk. Maybe they are using this to verify that you are the right person - you probably used that card originally to put money in for the gaming. That would be a way for them to authenticate you. "http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/the-7-most-significant-government-data-breaches/d/d-id/1327468  ""What makes the government breaches more significant though is the kind of information involved. In a majority of cases, government breaches involved personally identifying data, such as names, Social Security numbers, and birthdates, the loss of which have substantially greater consequences for victims than breaches involving loss of credit card data or email account information. In a few cases, the breaches involved loss of top secret and highly confidential data of national security value."""