Stolen: My Identity

You may have heard of someone who has had their identity stolen. You can now change that to definitely heard of someone who has had their identity stolen.

We've been away for a week's holiday in Devon and Cornwall. On Monday we were called by a DC Scullett [made-up name] from Midsomershire police force who told us the following:

Some burglar crim had been nicked in Oxford on a job.
He had a load of documents on his person/in his car.
One of those documents was a typed up A4 sheet with Vic and my details on it.
We must have been broken into at Chinnor Road last August -- the day Vic's new passport was "delivered" but never received by us and around the time our address book mysteriously went missing.

Looks as if the passport courier tipped off the crim who then carded our front door and rummaged through our personal and financial details... and left without leaving any sign of forced entry.

Vic was obviously very upset at the news. I was quite cool.
But then we got home on Saturday to find witness statements for us to fill in, together with a photocopy of the notes the crim had on us.

And this is scary stuff:

All our bank account numbers and overdraft limits.
Credit card details and credit limits.
Our places of work.
National Insurance numbers.
My salary figure.
Dates of birth (although mine was a year out).
Our old home address.
Vic's mobile number.
Our parents names and addresses and ex-directory telephone numbers.
Vic's old hotmail account (misspelt) and password.

This would account for the dodgy transaction on my credit card in May.

Fortunately for us, they have neither our new address nor our mother's maiden names. The maiden names would open the flood gates of security by-passes...

The good news is that the crim is banged up and apart from one transaction we haven't been hit too hard (yet). The bad news is I'm left wondering how many other crims out there have our details.

And then we have more:

DC Scullett phones me up this morning to tell me that the police searched the crim's house over the weekend and found two email addresses with Vic and my names in them -- with passwords -- written on a piece of paper.

I ventured into vic_dobscrubandco to discover an empty hotmail account but a contact address in Montpellier, France. It would appear as if the crim has set up a phoney company / mail-forwarding address in Vic's name and has used it, or one similar to it -- to pick up some hot goods to return to the UK: DC Scullet (who clearly cannot use the internet) got quite excited when I told him of the address in Montpellier... apparently he found a big stash of plates and dishes, all from Montpellier, in the crim's house.

I shall enjoy my day in court.

Now go and buy yourself a shredder and a burglar alarm and never believe things simply get "lost" in the post.