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Comment by cynicauliflower | Hacker News Reader

My Experian was hijacked, unfrozen, and used to get a $100k loan from Ford Credit. Took me ages to clean up. Bastards.

This sorta happened to me, except as soon as I got an email from Experian that my email address had been changed, I got to work talking to customer service to get back in. The CS rep had “no record” of anything out of the ordinary happening, just a regular email address changed “initiated” by me, when instead it was this brain dead system they have where anyone with the relevant SSN and security question info can register your account anew with a different email.

Once I got back in I saw credit pulls and immediately contacted the companies to figure out the car dealership in question, then called them to let them know that they should under no circumstances sell that car.

The worst part of such an experience is that once you've reported a case of fraud on your credit report, if you at a later date want to open a new bank/credit/whatever account somewhere then you have to jump through ridiculous hoops, or will simply be denied outright because they won't believe that you're who you are since your PII was flagged in the past.

Sounds great, I how do I sign up for this ahead of time?

Not a lawyer but this just screams legal action. Their systems clearly aren't sufficiently secure to prevent large scale fraud

There have been a couple of class actions, doesn't seem to have changed the outcome though.

Because like always, the punishment for the rich playing games with our lives is a negligible fine 1/10000th the profit they make selling your information to anyone with a buck.

I mean, the last time the settlement was like $27 per person in the suit?

And the form to get that settlement meant giving some random authority more personal information than these companies even have.

I would keep going too.

> used to get a $100k loan from Ford Credit

This sounds like it was used to get a vehicle - which are fairly trackable things. How did the ordeal unfold and conclude?

Same exact thing happened to me. I only dealt with the various credit agencies and Ford. And I had to make a police report to my local PD despite the crime occurring at a dealership across the country — the officer was very kind, and made clear that they would do literally nothing other than produce the case number I needed for the credit agencies.

I wonder if Ford in particular is more susceptible?

In any event, I’ve no idea whether a law enforcement eventually looked into it. But the sense I got was no one was going to do a damn thing.

(Oh and Progressive, because they got insurance for the vehicle in my name and also didn’t pay that. But it was 1000x less dollars, literally, so when I told the debt collector “lol not mine” they just went away).

Yeah, afaik, most Police won't do anything with this. My spouse's id was used to rent an Oakland luxury appartment in 2021, along with opening a credit union account and trying to open an amex. Thankfully amex called to check because there was already an account opened, and we were able to get the credit union account closed before it was usable, but the apartment complex seemed unable to do anything and Oakland PD didn't do anything other than acknowledge the report, they wouldn't return calls from our local PD either. IdentityTheft.gov is also a black hole.

Credit freezes are a joke, because if you have a person's credit report, you have enough information to cancel the freeze, even if you can't temporarily thaw it. Still, maybe it's better than nothing, so might as well. But it's then a pain if you need to interact with the credit system; some of the bureaux have such poor systems that your accounts will regularly not work; anyway, credit issuers don't tend to tell you what bureau they'll pull from until after they pull, so may as well unlock the big 3 before you do anything; and batch all your credit increase requests together.

Most likely the perpetrator immediately sold the vehicle, leaving yet another victim in their wake.

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