I’m opening the mail and what do I find? Two Visa credit cards, one for myself and one for Kathleen, from a bank in South Dakota. Not applications, mind you, but actual, active credit cards (for which they’re already trying to charge me an application fee of $198.)
So I call the place and they tell me that I applied for it via (wait for it) the internet. Which I didn’t. And they believe me (although the guy asks me five times, apparently thinking I don’t understand the question the first four times he asks me), so I’m not being charged for anything. But what’s unbelievably alarming is that whoever applied for it did so with 100% accurate personal information, right down to my mother’s maiden name.
So they tell me I should start calling the credit bureaus to inform them to put a “hawk watch” on my credit information. And I try to do this and am promptly stonewalled by phone menus or on-line menus, all of which boil down to the same thing: We won’t do anything until you order a copy of your credit report, for which we will charge you, and *then* we will give you a phone number where you can talk to someone who may be of help.
It’s not like it’s huge amounts of money for ordering the dámņëd thing, but on principle alone, it feels like extortion.
Anyone know any practical way to inform the credit bureaus without being forced to buy crap from them?
PAD
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