More bad news, it is IMPERATVE you all read this

Hi everyone,

I am picking up on a disturbing trend at my new place of employment. The majority of the new accounts I am required to collect are defaulted gas station credit cards. Shell, Amaco, Citgo, Texaco, you know the ones.

More often than not, when I contact these "debtors" or they contact me, they are taken by surprise and they swear they have never taken out such an account. Now, since I know consumer's rights, I'm not going to trample upon someone's right of validation. If they deny ever haivng these accounts and want to dispute them, more power to them. However, here is where it gets worse.

The dates on these accounts show and opening date and a charge off date of more than a year to up to ten years later, suggesting that the account was opened, paid upon for a period of time, then forgotten and turned over to collections, making identity theft difficult to prove from a creditor's perspective.

These "debtors" on these accounts have certain similarities. Most of them are in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Hampshire. Areas not exactly famous for high incomes, mostly low to middle incomes. Also, the "debtors" are usually retirees, college-age kids, and foreigners speaking broken English if any English at all. What does all this have in common? They are less likely to be able to afford legal counsel for identity theft! And since these defaulted account balances are small, supposedly they'd be better off just paying them and having them off their credit reports. They need their good name after all.

Here is one more alarming piece of information that all of you need to know to arm yourselves. Any person or agency with access to Accurint can acquire your date of birth and social security number just as long as they know your name and any past or present address.

I think the agency that sold my agency these accounts is behind these fraudulent gas card accounts. Why would all these gas station creditors need to steal all these identites and make up these phony accounts? It doesn't make sense. Sure, a few of the accounts are valid, people own up and pay them, but like I said earlier, more often than not people swear up and down they never had the account! One guy was 11 years old on the date his "account" was opened, one guy said he never owned a car or had a driver's license!

I want you all to keep your eyes peeled on your credit reports for any crap like this. The name to watch out for is Arvesco. This is the third party agency that sold us all these defaulted gas cards. I don't know how they did it, set up the accounts I mean, but it has been done, and the damage has been done. If there is any other information about this you need or that I have left out, please ask away.

Ari, that's really scary - anyone can get your SS# just by knowing your name and address! I wonder where they get this info from and if there's some way we can stop them. Thanks for posting this. I will definitely be keeping an eye on my credit reports.

Unfortunately dbaker, people access your information each and every day without you knowing it. Your social security number is everywhere you don't want it to be and sometimes people place it on the internet once their computers have been hacked. It is just amazing of how dirty and cruel creditors can be to give out your information without you knowing and without you even be warned that this is occurring.

Thanks for the heads up. I know that it is scary thought but what can we do with a goverment who insists on listening to our phone calls, tapping into our emails and opening our regular mail.

It's a shame that things like this will happen. It's just a numbers game to the fraudsters, if they can get 5 out of every 100 to pay then they still made some money off of their scam.

In Accurint's defense, since about November 2004 the company has been blocking out the last 4 of a person's ssn with ****. I also think they are on top of their security... when my boss retired and I took his spot, I never deleted his username from Accurint. After about 3 months, a guy from their security operations called to inquire why his username was inactive. When I told him my boss was no longer with the company, the guy told me "for security reasons, I will have to suspend your account until you delete his username," and the guy waited on the phone until I logged in and deleted my boss' id. I also remember that we had to go through a big process to get our company signed up with Accurint.

This is a big thing out here right now, too..I heard rumor that someone at my job has been a victim. It scares me half to death.

That's a sobering thought, Alexandra. Thanks, Debtcruncher, for the reassurance. It's just amazing to me what people can do with your personal information.

DBaker, to answer your question on where they get their info... Accurint is tied to Lexus Nexis. They can get their data from anything electronic... one of their main things is that they go through all the public court records and compile all the information: court cases, bankruptcies, property deeds, tax assessments (all stuff that you could get through Freedom of Information Act). I think they have agreements with many service providers, like phone companies and utilities, where they get names/addresses/phone numbers associated with service at a particular address. When you go to a fast-food restaurant, and they have those sweepstakes entries that you fill out for a prize... you put your name, address and phone # on it ... I think those get compiled and made a part of this big database. They're even tied to some state's DMVs.

I use Accurint for two things: fraud prevention and skip tracing. When a person applies for a loan, I'll put their social into the program and see what comes back. 99% of the time it comes back matching the info they put on the application. But many times I can catch people giving me a bad SSN, or most commonly I can find out that they put down their mom's address on the application and they really don't live there.

If I give a person a loan, and then they skip out on it, Accurint is also good for locating people. OR locating their family, who we can contact to try and find new whereabouts.

But just like obtaining a credit report on somebody, when you use Accurint you have to electronically sign off that you are using the information for a permissible purpose. I'm sure they keep track of what user/IP is accessing what information, and if there are problems they can trace it back to a person. I have been tempted to pull up our president's info, but I know that would throw up some sort of red flag in the system and FBI agents would swarm my office. All in all, I think the system is just as safe as anything else... there is potential for fraud in anything we do nowadays.

Ari---this site is lucky to have you (and others) who are in this business and are able to put others wise to illegal practices. Thank you for being our "watchdog" or are you the cat lover? Maybe "watchkitty"? Thank you

Ari-thanks for the heads up! That is really scary, and I hope whoever is doing this gets caught and prosecuted..Karen

Ari, I agree this site is very lucky to have people like you. This is a scary situation. Thanks for the information. KYSIDE38

This is yet another reason why it is so important to monitor your credit reports on a regular basis! Scary scary stuff.

DebtCruncher, every time I go on Accurint to skiptrace, I see the full social security number, even when all I search with is a name and address. It isn't completely safe yet. Someone can get into the collections business on a clean slate just for the purpose of collecting personal information and ripping people off. I think it should be made a law that only government collections like taxes and student loans should have access to that. Credit cards and payday loans don't need socials to skiptrace, and more often than not, people who collect those account are the kind of characters the governement agencies wouldn't give the time of day to: Parasites!

Interesting. I thought it was a system-wide thing that they didn't show the full social. I wonder why you get to see a full social and I can't? Must be in the way a company signs up for an account with them.

I agree, there's no reason why collectors would need to see a person's social just by searching for their name ... after all, wouldn't we already have the person's SSN on file if it was a legitimate debt?

Wow, thanks for the heads up !

That's the evil of it! These crap accounts have the person's social security number, current address, you name it, even worse, the account appear to have payment activity on them for a year or so which takes away any credibility in claiming fraud or identity theft.

My manager tells usto choose our words carefully when talking to the debtors about the accounts, we should not say "the account was opened..." and we should say "You opened the account in...." which to me sounds insidiously manipulative when it comes to identity theft and these suspicious accounts. If one or two people here and there denied opening the accounts, I might be inclined to discredit them, but I've heard this same claim over ten times so far and counting. Something is not right in this town.

I can imagine how difficult it is to try and tell someone they owe money when they truly believe they don't. Or how mind-boggling it is when you actually believe them, yet your boss is telling you to hound them.

I don't think I'd ever want to deal with credit card receivables for that reason, because it is all done through mail/internet and its a faceless transaction. At least my customers come into the office, I see them face-to-face and I check their driver's license. I have yet for anyone to tell me they didn't really take out a loan and don't know what I'm talking about.

I have a theory. There are bound to be instances of true identity theft, where someone actually did get the gas card in another person's name and maxed it out. Maybe the gas companies knew they were uncollectable, bundled them up and sold them to a bad debt buyer for a whatever they could get ... they figure let the next guy worry about it. One company sells it to another, and always lets the next one worry about it. Maybe your company snatched up a bunch of this stuff, not knowing it was all really fraud cases. And maybe the last guy put the payment history in and updated the addresses to make the accounts more sellable.