Identity Fraud. I've been 'done'.

[rich12]

So I got home tonight and found 3 letters from Vodafone.

2 of them are regarding two new contracts at £68/month etc all in my name/address.
I rang Vodafone and they have confirmed they were activated on the 13th of this month using from what I can find out is my name, address and date of birth. I asked her what bank details she had and they weren't mine but she also said that even before I rang, the accounts were with the fraud team. (Assuming because the bank details didn't match my details).

I then logged on to my credit report and there were 2 searches from Vodafone and even worse, a short term loan from Piggy bank for £936 again using my details above.

I can't contact the company until tomorrow but what the hell do I do??
My credit rating has gone from near perfect to just above poor. To make it all worse, my house is up for sale and am looking to move in the next couple of months.

[Ozzie Osmond]

Yup, very common indeed. The phone companies are so desperate to hand out expensive phones that they've made themselves easy to scam. They don't care; it's you who suffers. And the culprit is away with a shiny new phone they can sell in the back streets for £100.

I don't think it has any effect on your credit rating.

[vsonix]

Ozzie Osmond said:

Yup, very common indeed. The phone companies are so desperate to hand out expensive phones that they've made themselves easy to scam. They don't care; it's you who suffers. And the culprit is away with a shiny new phone they can sell in the back streets for £100.

I don't think it has any effect on your credit rating.

It won't now that he's alerted to it but it could have gone bad if he'd not opened the unsolicited mail for a few months

[Mattt]

You can register yourself for CIFAS I think it's called which means tighter checks before credit taken out.

[rich12]

Yeh the phone contracts aren't really whats getting me, it's the pay day loan. That has really hit my score.

I spoke to them this morning, again a Barclays account has been used and they also said that they send a pin to a phone number which you need to activate the loan. The number is 07768668575 which I rang and also happens to be a Vodafone number.

They also said the bank details had to match the address that was supplied but it doesn't as I've spoken to Barclays and they have no accounts in my name.

I've sent a form to Cifas but no idea what they will/can do.

[Greshamst]

Call piggy bank loans, and Vodafone and ask them to update their CIFAS fraud loading a with your genuine details (they're both members of CIFAS).This means if the fraudsters apply for any more accounts in your name they'll see that the email address or mobile number doesn't match the real information for Mr Rich12 and will decline.

You also need to ask them to remove the credit searches and the accounts from your credit file. You don't want a payday loan on there if applying for a mortgage as a lot of lenders will auto-decline if they see this.

Sign up to Experian and Eqidax and raise the accounts as fraudulent on there as well.

[rich12]

I'm on the phone to Vodafone again and they've just told me the phones were ordered in store which means the must have ID, utility bills etc in my name. This is getting very bad.

[Ozzie Osmond]

rich12 said:

again a Barclays account has been used and

Yup, same with me. Barclays let someone open an account in my name and then that account was used to scam the phone company. Barclays were utterly and completely unhelpful, essentially refusing to answer any questions at all. The phone company Orange did the same. Barclays eventually sent me a sort of "everything's OK" letter but I didn't come away thinking it had been a satisfactory experience at all.

[rich12]

A little update,

I got the bank details of where the loan money had gone into and Barclays have confirmed the money has gone into the account so they've locked it and have raised a case with the fraud department. What will happen now is beyond me...

[Greshamst]

Ozzie Osmond said:

rich12 said:

again a Barclays account has been used and

Yup, same with me. Barclays let someone open an account in my name and then that account was used to scam the phone company. Barclays were utterly and completely unhelpful, essentially refusing to answer any questions at all. The phone company Orange did the same. Barclays eventually sent me a sort of "everything's OK" letter but I didn't come away thinking it had been a satisfactory experience at all.

I work in fraud investigation and 95%of the time money is laundered or fraudulent funds are put in an account, it's through a Barclays account.
Yet they are incredibly unwilling and unhelpful when it comes to sharing intelligence, or assisting in investigating fraudsters across different banks.
Worst offenders, and no passion to assist others in stopping fraud when it affects society as a whole.

[NickCW]

All you can do really is call up all the affected lenders, and make them aware - also ask for them to remove any trace against you and your history file. Equifax/Experian wouldn't remove anything when I had similar without the Bank/Phone company contacting them.

Also the marker you put against to make it harder for people to take out credit in your name..makes it harder for you to get credit, so its worthwhile but a double-edged sword.

Get access to your online credit report as well and keep tabs on it.

Unfortunately most of these criminals have a contact who works for a phone provider/shop who will put these transactions through once they have your details - so the lack of id isn't an issue..

[rich12]

Got home and have received a very nice looking credit card from Debenhams.
Rang them up and asked if it had a balance on it and they wouldn't tell me.

Wonder what i'll receive tomorrow.

Good job I haven't just accepted an offer on our house and going to be moving soon..

[EddieSteadyGo]

rich12 said:

Got home and have received a very nice looking credit card from Debenhams.
Rang them up and asked if it had a balance on it and they wouldn't tell me.

Wonder what i'll receive tomorrow.

Good job I haven't just accepted an offer on our house and going to be moving soon..

My wife and I had a similar experience - both identities stolen and several thousand pounds of goods ordered and delivered to an address in London from several companies. Plus they opened a bank account with the Halifax and took out £1000 overdraft in cash!

It was a pain to get it resolved fully as we had to involve the police, several letters and lots of phone calls, but you will manage to get it cleared up eventually.

In my case, they used information available on Companies House (which apparently is a common source of information for fraudsters). After that I updated my details to prevent my personal address from being easily visible.

Plus as other have mentioned earlier in thread, I subsequently registered with CIFAS. It really does make it much harder for any criminal to use my details as they add a password onto your account which needs to be personally verified for any future application involving credit.

[rich12]

When you say the police, do you mean the actual police or action fraud as i've rang them a couple of times and they just say to speak to action fraud.

[robsdesk]

rich12 said:

When you say the police, do you mean the actual police or action fraud as i've rang them a couple of times and they just say to speak to action fraud.

I had a similar situation to Eddie, I'm an IT contractor & have a limited company with the registered address as my home address, ended up with several mobile contracts with all the networks & a few store cards. Had the store card people put me on CIFAS, once you speak to the right people (which takes some effort - be a complete pain & refuse to get off the phone until you get hold of someone other than customer services, but you will need to call in office hours) it gets sorted reasonably fast. Request the statutory reports from Equifax, Experian & Call Credit, all the searches etc.. the fraudulent activity will (should - if they've not within a couple of months keep being a pain) be removed.

I didn't speak to the police - I was told to report it to ActionFraud, was given a reference number which everyone accepted (the mobile phone companies had all figured out it was fraudulent already & blocked the accounts which probably helped), in my case they were using a Santander debit card (who I bank with) in my name, but as I eventually found out (after being a very angry customer & refusing to take data protection as an answer) the account number was genuine but not in my name - which suggested someone had made a fake debit card (clearly worked though).

To make this more fun, we'd literally just moved house so was reliant on mail forwarding etc.. to keep up with what was happening. Within 3 months it was as if it never happened.

[EddieSteadyGo]

rich12 said:

When you say the police, do you mean the actual police or action fraud as i've rang them a couple of times and they just say to speak to action fraud.

In the particular case I mentioned, it was reported to Action Fraud and the details were passed to the Police who came round to the house to take a statement.

However, I've reported other smaller cases of fraud to Action Fraud and heard nothing further.