ID Theft Update: The Cost of Inconvenience

I thought I’d occasionally write about life after discovering thieves have stolen your identity.

Let’s start with a bit of background: Three times now I’ve been notified hackers broke into a server holding my personal information, including social security number and/or banking information. The first two involved personnel/financial servers maintained by state agencies while I was employed by the Cal State University system. The third was via news media involving a debit card purchase I made at a San Francisco DSW store. To date, I haven’t unearthed evidence that my information is being used by someone else -- although there was a suspicious mortgage, but it turned out to be something entirely different.

After the first two notifications, I asked for credit reports to check for unlawful activity. These I am entitled to under California’s breach notification act. I discovered that I had a lot of credit available due to old store cards, and my job-hopping due to the military life had taken a toll on my FICO score. But the score was in a respectable range to secure credit for a car, house, student loans, etc.

Then, last October I initiated a credit freeze, as instructed in the theft notices, which dramatically reduced credit card pitches but also made it impossible to take out any credit in my name, including cell phones and cell phone service in March. Of course, it made it impossible for anyone else to take out credit in my name too. We paid cash for the car we bought this spring, in part because we couldn’t secure a loan with my name on it, but it still required one of us to undergo a credit check. We chose Gilbert, of course. Essentially, I have not borrowed or been approved for anything in almost a year. Net result: I feel more secure but I also am a higher risk to lenders because of my inactivity and lower scores. This is important because soon we’ll need to take out student loans for the girls’ college educations and buy a condominium with a home loan.

I also canceled my debit card after the DSW incident for a new one that is a pure debit, rather than debit/credit card. This card carries fraud protection by the bank, but, again because of the credit freeze, it did not get approved by VISA for use as credit. Initially, I was miffed because every time I tried to use it in a store or restaurant, I was rejected. Even when I was told the merchant accepted debit cards, they treated the card as credit and it therefore was always declined. The key word to use is not debit but “ATM.”

Despite all the recent hassles and headaches, I’m starting to realize merits of this series of rejection. If I can’t use the card and credit lines as I want, no one else can either.

So now I carry a lot more cash to take care of the incidental weekly expenses I used to pay with my debit card. And I find that I am not spending as much because of the inconvenience and because I now think twice about the purchase. This is a good thing. What’s still bad is that score, though. My next task is to sign up for regular monthly reports (I got my federally-mandated freebie but, as such, it was woefully incomplete and made me wonder if the credit reporting bureaus really pushed this law as lure for new customers and not for consumer protection.). Meantime, I’ll also continue to explain when people decline my card or wonder why I’m being evasive that I was the victim of ID theft. So far, everyone’s understood my plight.