“there’s a woman somewhere in the area who has a driver’s license with all of my personal information but her photo instead of mine”

Photo by PoPville flickr user Phil

“Dear PoPville,

Monday night, I noticed a strange deposit of $20 cash into my Wells Fargo checking account, followed quickly by a $1,800 cash withdrawal. Cue panic mode.

Yesterday was spent trying to sort out what happened, and it boils down to there’s a woman somewhere in the area who has a driver’s license with all of my personal information but her photo instead of mine, and she has memorized my signature (I have a copy of the withdrawal slip she signed, and it fully freaked me out – I can send you the photo of it next to mine if you’re interested but do not want that on the internet, please).

I’m doing everything I can think of to protect myself. I’ve changed all logins for credit cards, had Wells Fargo change all of my account numbers, and I put a 90-day freeze on my credit with all three bureaus. I already had a LifeLock account, which notified me on Monday that some information about me had been sold on the deep/dark web.

Wells Fargo has been very weird about the whole thing. I had a 20 minute call with them Monday night that my branch said on Tuesday they could not see a record of happening. The online record showed that both fraudulent transactions occurred at a branch in Aspen Hills, MD, but when I went there and had a contentious turned friendly conversation with the “store” manager he told me the withdrawal happened in McLean, VA. The claims department on their 800 number told me the fraud department handles this, but that I’m not allowed to contact the fraud department. And now they keep sending me emails about how I can prevent this from happening again.

I’d really like to connect with other PoPvillers on what else I should be doing and commiserate if this has happened to others. I’ve never had my identity stolen before and feel really weird about it.”