About 2 weeks ago, a several hundred dollar purchase was delivered in my name to an address I haven't lived at or had mail delivered to in years - however a relative still sometimes stays there and happened to be there when the package arrived. They thought it was weird and contacted me to see if I'd really ordered it, which I hadn't.
I immediately checked all 3 credit reports, and emailed the company the item was purchased from. I was able to determine that:
- Both billing and shipping were tied to my name and that same old address. The card used was a Visa and the last 4 digits of the card were not any I recognized or could find any record of.
- I pulled all 3 credit reports and subscribed to monitoring as well. I could not find any accounts, open or closed, that were new or suspicious and have not received an update about any new accounts in the past week. The initial purchase was now about 3 weeks ago, and I found out about it about a week ago.
- I also logged in to any account listed on any of the reports as still open, even if I haven't used them recently, and verified there was no recent activity or that the account was really closed and was being misreported.
- The person placing the order created an email address made to look like my name (first initial and last name), but it is definitely not an email I've ever used or created.
- They also used the old landline phone number from when I lived there, that was my family's land line number for years, but has been out of service at least 3-4 years, maybe longer.
- The transaction code details returned from the vendor's automatic verification with Visa when the order was placed showed that the billing address was "N" (match failed), but the security/CVV code was a perfect match. So it appears the card they have may not really be registered to that billing address, but was cleared because they have the physical CVV code. I assume my name must still be a match though?
- I couldn't even find a suspicious hard pull on my credit.
Given the above, I'm a little confused what exactly has happened. Is there some shady creditor out there that intentionally gives credit accounts and doesn't report them? Who would possibly extend credit without a credit pull? I feel naive, but I really thought identity theft always showed up quickly on your credit report, or else what is the point of all the monitoring?
I have filed an FTC complaint, and plan to file a police report next. I'd love to call the bank directly but I don't even know what lender granted the card. I called Visa and basically got the brush-off that they wouldn't do anything till I had a police report. Very annoying and unimpressive on their part - even if they couldn't give me any information, I'd have expected them to take down the transaction details and look into it. Nope, didn't seem to care.
Any thoughts or links as to how this happens? If the relative hadn't intercepted the package and called me, I'd have no idea any of this was going on. I'm assuming the ID thief is local to the area too, and thought they could use the address as a drop address since often no one is staying there. Otherwise it makes even less sense to have the package sent there.
