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kacyk,
Sorry to hear this. These phishing attacks are very convincing.

What did you do when you contacted the credit bureaus? Did you place a "fraud alert" on your "account?"

I ask because we did this when my wife's purse was stolen from her office at work. It temporarily gave us some peace of mind, but unlike they suggested, these alerts were not lifted after 6 months and this created problems.

While these alerts were in place, it was impossible for us to get credit in her name for things like store shopping cards and some other stuff. For instance, those deals where you apply for a new store card to get the 12-month-no-payment style credit all had to be done in my name. In theory the are supposed to simply see the "fraud alert" when applying and ask for more thorough proof of identity. But it seemed that the credit application systems and/or the employees were too stupid to follow this procedure.

We ultimately had to make some very lengthy phone calls with the credit bureaus and some other information clearing house company (Credit Account Services if I recall) to restore things to normal after about a year and a half.

So if you place a "fraud alert" on your identity, be prepared to run into all sorts of trouble getting new credit and/or use your wife as a sole credit holder.


For everybody's sake, and hopefully obvious in retrospect:

no organization worth anything will contact you asking you for information totally out of context