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Saturday, July 02, 2005 

Identity Theft

Over the past week I received a few e-mails from eBay saying my credit card was used to open an account. I logged into my eBay account to see if there was anything weird, nothing there seemed out of place. I decided the emails must be spam and didn't worry about them. Jumping forward to this morning, I received a phone call from someone who said they had just won the bid on a bike I had posted for sale on eBay. I was very confused, and told him that I've never posted for sale on eBay and they should definitely not buy it. Because of this incident I figured I should check into all of this. I e-mailed eBay explaining to them the situation, but I wasn't sure how long it would take for them to respond. In the mean time I bought a credit report just to make sure no other credit cards were opened under my name. Luckily nothing on the credit report seemed out of place, I even found out I have good credit =). Now i just had to make sure I kept this good credit and stopped this credit card information theft. A few hours later I received an email from eBay informing me that an account had indeed been opened using my credit card number and they had now cancelled the account. Well now I knew I was on to something. I immediately called the fraud center of my credit card and spoke to them, very nice people I might add. We walked through the past few days of charges to my account, nothing wrong there except the $1 charge and immediate $1 debit from eBay used to verify a credit card and open an account. Since no charges seemed wrong it was simply a matter of canceling this card and having a new card and card number issued to me. Well after going through all of this I can definitely see why Identity theft sucks so much. I was very nearly screwed in this whole ordeal, luckily I received that call this morning and I knew something was wrong. And I lived happily every after =) ... with my new grill I bought this morning!