I'm a long time subscriber to monitoring at myFico in one form or another, right now just Quarterly Monitoring. This evening I got the following alert:
"New information has been detected in your identity information. Go to your alerts [this was a live link but I deleted that here] and check this recent activity for ID theft." I went to my alerts page and found the following message as the only new identity information: "New address detected: [followed by a completely unfamiliar address in my metropolitan area]."
When I clicked the link beside the address information to see what to do, the recommended action if the address was unfamiliar to you was to buy your credit reports to track down any threats to your identity. So I bought first one, then another credit report. Neither had anything out of the ordinary about them, no new addresses at all, certainly not the one listed in the alert, no new accounts or recent inquiries. There was a recent unexplained drop of a few points in my TU score, but none in EQ, otherwise, nothing at all. I just spent $32 and a couple of hours of worry, and I'm nowhere ahead of where I was. The recommendation if you found nothing wrong in the credit reports was to do nothing further
But that doesn't feel right. Am I supposed to assume myFICO just made an error and no one really reported this address in connection with my credit records? If so, how could they make an error like that? If someone else erroneously reported the address to a CRA, why is it not in one of my credit reports where I could follow up on it? Surely myFICO had some basis for associating the address with me, so how do I track that down?
I sent a message to customer service, but I don't really expect a personal answer. It's very worrisome for it to be suggested that someone used a different address in connection with your credit - for that seemed to be the implication - but to have no way to get even a hint of what to do about it? I have identity theft protection from AMEX, but I can't really call them and give them this as a lead; it doesn't really amount to much now does it? So what would trigger an alert like that?
Right now I'm just out $32 and two hours and still uneasy with nowhere to go with it. What's the point of having Quarterly Monitoring if I get false alarms and deadends for my trouble? My credit is important enough to me to keep an eye on it, but what does that amount to in these circumstances? Am I being appropriately vigilant in wanting to follow up or overly fussy about what was likely an error? And if so, where did the error occur, and how can I get any clue about it?
The first message was, "Be very worried because of this specific thing." Now it's "Nevermind" but without any explanation of why that specific thing is not a problem. It's sort of hard to just forget it without an explanation.
trulyb
TU 783 EQ 794 12/17/2009
Message Edited by trulyb on 12-17-2009 10:00 PM
