When I learned that my Social Security number was floating around the internet and people were trying to use it to buy cars, a dad joke came to mind. It’s a good one, by which I mean a real groaner. I’ll save it for the end of this column.
But my identity theft fiasco started more with cussing than groaning. And scrambling. And trying to explain to strangers that I was possibly being robbed and I needed their help.
On Labor Day, just as my wife and I were finishing up a quiet dinner in our newly empty nest, the police called me. Specifically, someone who said his name was Chris Something or Cliff Somebody was calling from the Irving Police Department to let me know that someone had used my personal information to apply for credit at a car dealership in Lexington, Ky. The dealership had flagged the driver license as a forgery and alerted the Lexington Police Department, which called the Irving Police Department, which was calling me.
With my hands still wet with dishwater, it took several seconds for all of that to drip into my consciousness. I was being told that I was being robbed. Charlie Whoever pointed me to a place on Irving PD’s website where I could file a report of identity theft and then the phone call was over and then I immediately realized I had almost no information but instead a long list of questions I should have asked Cody Whoozit and that I should have gotten his name and maybe badge number and what kind of journalist was I anyway?
I called right back. Carlos Whodaguy didn’t answer. Instead, after some hold music, I spoke to a lady who thought I had been scammed — it’s easy for crooks to spoof caller ID numbers, she said — or that I was scamming her. She said fraud detectives don’t work after hours on holidays and then she said she searched “the phone system” and determined that no phone calls had been placed to my number from Irving PD. She suggested I come to the police station in person so I could show someone my caller ID and file a report.
I wasn’t sure about all that. First, the caller hadn’t asked me for any information so I didn’t see the design of his scam. He hadn’t said he was a fraud investigator. And I was surprised she could track all outgoing calls. But what did I know? I am plainly the rube in this story.
I checked to make sure the number on my call history matched the number for Irving police. But could I trust that? Maybe she wasn’t even Irving PD. Maybe the first guy wasn’t either. Maybe there was no identity theft. Or maybe this was just the first deception in a long con that would leave me confused, embarrassed and poor. The next day when I told a co-worker about all this, she sent me a story from The Cut in which journalist Charlotte Cowles recounts a complicated scam that included several people lying to her and ended with her putting a shoe box full of $50,000 into the back seat of an unknown car. Was that where I was headed?
Entering the Matrix
Years ago, my wife had also been the victim of identity theft. Since then, we’ve had an insurance policy just for this sort of thing. That was our next call. After we navigated a phone tree and listened to some hold music, a representative from Zander Insurance filed a fraud alert with all three credit bureaus and assigned a representative to my case.
I was in the parking lot at 7:55 the next morning waiting for someone to unlock the doors of the Irving Criminal Justice Center. I spoke through glass with an officer in a vestibule who said both police phone calls sounded like a scam to him, even though I had initiated the second one. He said there’s not a way to search the department’s phone system for outgoing calls. And he said the usual course of action would be for the dealership or Lexington PD to call me directly, not my city’s police. Again, he told me to file a police report, even though I had no real information.
I started to realize this was going to be a pattern: Everyone I spoke to would assume everything that happened to me before speaking to them was part of the scam. The first call from Irving PD’s number? Probably a scammer. My return call? Might have been rerouted to a scammer. The call from Lexington PD to Irving PD, if there had really been one? Part of the scam.
I imagined a heist movie scene in which the man I had just spoken to in the vestibule was a criminal, kicking a bound-and-gagged officer under the counter whose uniform he had just stolen. I imagined my wife’s identity theft years ago was just the first step in a long game of getting us to open an account with a fake insurance agency. The scammers had been sitting on our information for years and now they were ready to spring their trap. Or maybe I would wake up in a few minutes in a liquid-filled pod, detach a series of hoses from my body and realize that Artificial Intelligence had taken over the world and put me in a Matrix. Anything seemed possible. No one seemed trustworthy.
To catch a thief
Not long after I got to work that day, I started to get more information. A nice lady who said her name was Peggy called from Franklin Nissan in Columbia, Ky. She said the dealership had denied credit to someone posing as me. She was calling me directly, just like Officer Vestibule said it should work.
Peggy sent me a photo of the fake ID: a Texas driver’s license with my full name, address and date of birth, but with someone else’s photo, description and license number. I looked into the goateed face of someone else next to my name and wanted to hate him. But then I realized there was little chance that photo was the actual crook.
More calls came in like Peggy’s: Jay from Cannon Ford in Starkville, Miss.; Marcus from Middlekauff Ford in Twin Falls, Idaho. Even the Fake Me can’t afford luxury cars. He was after Broncos. And a Harley.
All this made me think of those auto finance guys you find at any car dealership with their desktop printers and hackneyed jokes. Their job seems terrible, just one of many things that make car buying unpleasant. But now I was grateful for them. They had stopped a thief.
Sadly, they are probably used to it. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, almost 24 million people have their identity stolen in America every year. That’s 9% of U.S. residents age 16 and older. This year, I joined them.
Muzak
The following day, I heard from the Zander rep — an airy-voiced, methodical man named Kerry who had to read the same script every time we got on a call together, informing me that our conversation was being recorded. He called it “getting legal.”
Kerry pulled my credit and saw there had been several hits, mostly at car dealerships. He explained that we had to join a conference call with each of them to make sure they hadn’t extended credit to Fake Me and to ask them to remove that activity from the record. Kerry and I were going to spend a lot of time together, mostly navigating phone trees and listening to hold music. I wondered if it might be less painful just to let the guy have my identity.
Most of the people we talked to had smelled something fishy about Fake Me. He was trying to do these transactions entirely online, refused to FaceTime with them, and said he would send someone else to come pick up his new car. Some of the finance guys seemed proud of themselves for sniffing it out. Two of them, however, had approved Fake Me and forwarded the account to their finance bureaus for funding. That meant Kerry and I had to call those bureaus to sample more hold music. Luckily, no one had actually handed over any keys.
The calls yielded what seemed like valuable information. I got more copies of the fake ID as well as a fake insurance card, a phone number, email and IP address.
Eagerly, I called Sgt. James McLellan of Irving PD, who had followed up on my previous Irving police interaction and left his phone number. After enjoying some hold music, I passed along my leads.
McLellan tempered my enthusiasm, explaining that Fake Me was probably using someone else’s computer (public, borrowed or stolen) and he was almost certainly using a VPN. When the good sergeant told me this, I happened to be in the parking lot in front of a North Dallas shopping mall where I was about to meet someone for lunch. I looked across to a coffee shop and realized my abuser may have been sitting right there, sipping his latte and watching me sweat. Or he may have been in Singapore. With this crime, there’s no way to tell.
Or both could be true. One dealership said Fake Me had an East Asian accent. Another said he sounded Hispanic. There could be dozens of punks out there posing as me, which is what gave me the idea for the dad joke at the end of this essay.
I remembered that my wife did a workplace training last year about cybercrime and ransomware. The presenter said there are entire call centers, often in Eastern Europe, to which “customers” — that is, victims — must call in and navigate phone trees and listen to hold music and verify their identity so the call center rep can match them with the appropriate account to process their ransom. I wondered if those calls were recorded for quality assurance. I wondered if the hold music included verbal interludes: “Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line for a brief survey after we’re finished robbing you blind.”
Be like me
Finally, on Thursday afternoon, Kerry told me we had made our last call. The fraud alert would stay on my account and if Fake Me tried anything else, I would hear about it. The dark night of hold music had ended. I felt like hugging Kerry. Instead I told him I was thinking of writing a column about this whole experience and asked if I could use his full name.
“I’ve never gotten that request before,” he said, and then referred me to Zander’s media relations department, which would offer me phone trees and hold music.
If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s simply that identity theft insurance is worth it, and that the feeling of being victimized sucks almost as much as hold music. It feels like knowing there’s someone I don’t trust with a key to my home. It makes me want to change the locks. Except the locks, in this case, are things that are really hard to change, like my date of birth.
Still, I try to see the bright side. When it dawned on us that there might be hordes of thieves with my information, I told my wife, “Hey, everybody wants to be me.”
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