Well I suppose it was going to happen but in a surprising way.
On last Friday afternoon in mid afternoon there was a knock on the door and a courier in a motorcycle helmet hands over a small parcel with 'ere mate this is for you' .He then turned round and left and not even asking for a signature.
So as the largish purple plastic packed parcel was addressed to me I opened it and to my surprise found two Hi-Tech items, one an Apple Ipod-Touch and a TomTom Sat/Nav. Wow I thought perhaps Jennifer ordered them for me as a surprise Christmas present but NO!! We are saving money she said so it wasn't me. So I checked with Michael and Joanne and neither knew anything about it.
Upon phoning the supplier a mail order house called 'VERY' I asked what credit card had been used for this purchase anticipating it was connected to last week's entry but no again. It would appear to be a case Identity theft as when checking with supplier they had my full address detail's, telephone number and surprisingly my date of birth, Whoa where did they get that from??
It came as a complete surprise to me that you could just phone up and open a credit account without providing any payment method and just order six hundred pounds of the latest gizmo's and they would send it out. It would appear they had run a credit check on me and therefore the item was despatched to our home address. Wow I thought, when I was working some years ago my company would never have given that amount of credit to a customer without the accounts department getting three forms completed, multiple signatures and running bank check etc. How stupid are Very in their process.
When speaking to the Fraud Department at Very they were a little surprised at what had happened as it would appear that fraudsters use one of two of the following methods. The first order placed must be despatched to the registered home address and therefore a small item is ordered, of little value, but 24 hours later they order items worth a lot more and they are allowed to send it to a different address. So it looks like the fraudsters on my case screwed up.
I was advised also to be careful who you meet at your front door as fraudsters have been known to wait for the parcel to arrive by the official courier and then call at the house and apologise for the mistake and take the item away. They can get violent if you deny that you have received this parcel.
I have an ID Aware programme in place and so consulted them on what action to take whilst VERY would report this episode to CIFAS which is an anti-ID fraud organisation and this will know appear on my credit report but not upsetting my financial status.
Boy, did I not need this hassle when we had friends arriving for dinner in about one hour.
Did anybody read in the paper about the guys who broke in to a clothing warehouse in Wales and then left the scene after the robbery and drove their quad bikes at four o'clock in the morning down the main rail track expecting no trains but one did come along and killed two of the lads. Rough justice perhaps!!
Anyway, Christmas and New Year is approaching fast and we are expecting a full house on the 31 December to see in the new year with friends from our neighbourhood and we are both looking forward to this very much
A few days after this we shall be departing for Miami, Florida where we will travel around the State and then head off to Austin in Texas via New Orleans for a couple of weeks and sampling some Cajun food enroute
