Oracle : Continued fun with Identity Fraud

[techguru]

As I have noted previously some nefarious fella applied for a bunch of credit in my name about a year ago. The various banks and building societies involved have ranged from great (MBNA) to terrible (Sainsbury's Bank*).

Given that I am invovled in a fraud inquiry I am stunned just how some of the companies have acted. For example a while ago I was contact by a credit agency in Glasgow out of the blue. They wanted me to confirm my date of birth, which of course I wasn't just going to give them because I don't know them from Adam. They suggested that I contact Lloyds bank for confirmation. It turns out, after be passed between six different telephone numbers, that when they hand over a "bad debt" to a credit agency that Lloyds deletes the account. So I had a agency asking for money; but no way to confirm that they are a real company.... that took a while to sort out.

Today though I had another classic attempt to raise my blood pressure. The police in Newbury are now on the case and have been contacting all companies that performed credit checks on me in the last year. HFc bank called me today and started to ask for personal information to confirm who I was. Of course I refused and offered to call them back aftering confirming the number of the head office with directory enquiries.

You would think that a bank would never cold call somebody asking for personal information. Worse still this was the Fraud department!

Still hopefully this little chapter will be resolved soon, my case officer is hopeful about a conviction as we have a nice big pile of evidence to point the finger with.

Lets just hope that a national ID scheme with biometric information doesn't make the problem worse. Account details and PIN numbers I can change, fingerprints and iris patterns are a bit harder to update. This can already be seen in the US where the perminance of a persons social security number makes it very hard to deal with identity fraud.


* To there credit they have gotten there collective arses in gear and eventually sent my wife some flowers for threatening to sent the bayliffs around when she was in bed ill.

http://www.orablogs.com/gdavison/archives/001367.html