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July 9, 2015 06:00 pm

Ask Slashdot: Dealing With Ongoing Suspected Identity Theft?

njnnja writes: My wife receives periodic emails (about once every other month) from a cable company that is not in our service area that purport to confirm that she has made changes to her account, such as re-setting her password. Her email address is not a common one so we do not believe that it is someone accidentally using it; rather, we believe that an identity thief is subscribing to cable services intentionally using her name and email address. Whenever we have gotten an email we have called the cable company, been forwarded to their security department, and we are assured that her social security number is not being used and that they will clear her name and email address out of their system. Yet a few weeks later we get another email. Our concern is that when the cable company goes after my wife for the unpaid balance on the account I am sure that neither they nor a collection agency will care much that it's not her social security number — it's her name and they will demand she pays. We have a very strong password (long, completely random string of chars, nums, and symbols) and 2-factor authentication on the email account so we are fairly certain that no one is currently hacking into her email (at least, it's not worth it for however many thousands of dollars they can actually steal off this scam), But we think that the cable company should be doing more to not be complicit in an attempted identity theft. We have made it clear that we don't live in the area they cover so we should not have an account, but the fact that they keep setting up an account in her name means that they just don't care. Which is fine; I don't expect a cable company to care that they inconvenience us, but I would like to know if there is any way that we can make them care about it (liability, regulations, etc). I know YANAL but does anyone have any ideas about how to handle this? Thanks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/ha7-v7kfmco/ask-slashdot-dealing-with-ongoing-suspected-identity-theft

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