Unknown payment made to my credit cards

[Anonymous]

mssher - thanks for your expertise. I was following this thread today and also had big doubts this was some sort of a fraud thing. I work in CS for an insurance company home office and I know from my dealings that payments do accidentally post to wrong accounts for various reasons. This would make no sense if it was fraud. And, all of our calls are recorded too. 

[Anonymous]

Could it be possible that maybe they opened a bank account under your name and made the payments with it? I would call the bank from where the payments were made and ask if you had an account with them.

[longtimelurker]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Could it be possible that maybe they opened a bank account under your name and made the payments with it? I would call the bank from where the payments were made and ask if you had an account with them.

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Again, why make it so complex.   If they have access to the account that funded the new bank account, they could just use those funds.   Every extra step is a way to get blocked, it's not as if it is hiding an audit trail.   With stolen info, time is of the essense before the rightful owner reports the problem and the info becomes useless.

I see three possible explanations.

1) A very clumsy and stupid thief

2) CCC mistake, followed by denials and lies

3) Story is untrue

OK, 4) Thief is brilliant in some way I cannot comprehend

And since 4) is impossible as I understand everything, I think Occam's razor would suggest 2.  (Or 3 if this wasn't a FSR community)

[Rice1o5]

I have no reason to make some bs story up. If I made the story up why would I come on here to post about it???

Either way, whatever the reason behind what happen, I did what I was supposed to.

[Anonymous]

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@mssher wrote:

my best guess is that somebody "most likely" called in to make payments on their CC's, they provided their SSN to pull up the accounts in lieu of the full card #'s (which I sometimes do), and the representative most likely fat-fingered the number and pulled up the wrong accounts!  Obviously, if this was done over the phone, then the Capital One representative, and NOT the caller, changed the account information as well.

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This was my immediate first guess, too. All it takes is a CSR who's a bit preoccupied or maybe feeling under the weather or just new to the job to make a small series of mistakes for this to occur. I worked at a car dealership, and I recall an instance where a walk-in customer's payment was credited to the wrong account. There was validation in the systems to prevent this kind of thing, but if you blew by/ignored the prompts and didn't follow protocol (eg, because it was crazy busy), I can see how it could've happened.

[longtimelurker]

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@Rice1o5 wrote:
I have no reason to make some bs story up. If I made the story up why would I come on here to post about it???

Either way, whatever the reason behind what happen, I did what I was supposed to.

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I don't think you made the story up, but your question makes no sense!   It turns out that lots of people post untrrue stuff on the internet (shocking, I know!) for various reasons., people make stories up JUST so they can post them.

[NRB525]

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@Rice1o5 wrote:
I also have to.have a pin on my account with the IRS now too because in 2013 someone I don't know tried to file a joint tax return with all of my info
So this wouldn't be the first fraud issue I have dealt with.

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This is the point where my eyes got really wide. It is quite possible the CapOne payments are just the beginning of a new ID theft initiative by the same person or an inheritor of the personal information. In order to change the account addresses and other information over the phone, I would hope the fraudster would have to provide even more verification information. I'm surprised CapOne didn't insist on getting the CVV number from the cards to verify the person was paying and changing all this info. If this was a fat finger error, the CSR has ham hands.

OP has been taking a lot of ____ for this post, but I think OP is on the right track to maximize the lockdown on all personal information. There's no telling what the spoofing objective is with this fraud angle.

And, FWIW, this is a good reason to keep toy limits on all your CC

[Rice1o5]

NRB- well as far as my CC's go they now require a pin as extra security. So if anyone calls in or eveb tries the chat rep and tries to access any information about my account they ask for the name, dob, account number, last 4 of SSN and the new pin I set up.

As I said I've done my part. That's all I can do. Thank you to those of you who were helpful.

[paris75]

This happened to me once at the bank. The rep mistyped my account number and deposited $3000 into the wrong account. Good thing I checked the next morning and called the bank. At first they said they had no record of me making a deposit, but luckily I kept the receipt and had all the info. They called me back a couple hours later and explained the mix up.

[Anonymous]

how large of a payment are we talking here? tens, hundreds, or thousands? sounds like it must be a really really small, or a really really large payment, so large you feel guilty about it.

maybe perhaps they wanted to leave it on there for your troubles?