Credit Identity Theft | Sarah And I Become Victims Of Credit Identity Theft

Sarah And I Become Victims Of Credit Identity Theft

So Sarah and I graduated and started to make a life for ourselves.

She got a job as an accountant with a local workers insurance company, where she works to this day.

I did student teaching for 5 months and graduated with my teaching certificate. After interviewing with 3 different school districts, I was given 2 offers of employment and finally chose to work within the Omaha Public School district.

While our lives were unfolding, so was the plan of the guy who stole our personal information out of our mailbox.

In the span of a few months, Sarah and I went from making less than $20,000 a year in combined income to making more than triple that. We needed that income, because we had to start paying on our student loans once we graduated.

Life was good. With our new careers, we moved out of the small apartment and into a better one located closer to where Sarah worked and further from the city’s crime zones.

With the jump in our income, we started to play a little bit more with credit. Neither Sarah or I had really had much in the way of credit before we graduated. We had large sums in student loans of course, but I had one credit card that I had used since I started college and Sarah had 3 or four that she used irregularly. I would guess that we had good credit ratings, because we weren’t ever denied for any credit when we applied for some.

We set up a credit account at Best Buy using that Rewards Zone card.. Sarah and I both purchased Apple laptops there. We sold Sarah’s old Mazda 3 and bought a new Honda Civic. We furnished our apartment nicely, but not too nice, since we decided that we were saving for a house.

Basically, we went and opened a bunch of lines of credit in our names, like millions of other couples do every year. We had no idea that the guy who had stolen our personal information out of our mailbox was doing the exact same thing.

While we were out living our normal lives, this guy was living what he considered a normal life – stealing from other people. We know for sure that very early on, he managed to open a credit card line in my name – and the limit on that card was pretty high. We found out later that he sold our information to a bunch of other people online, and found out even later that the information that was bought was then used and resold.

We just didn’t notice it at all. We had no idea that this guy was out there. How could we? Like most people, we didn’t check our credit report on a regular basis. There was no need, we thought, because we never were denied for credit.

We had a lot to learn.

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