Identity theft and credit card fraud can happen easily, so it’s especially frightening when you lose your wallet (which I did this last weekend). I must have walked all around campus at least three times trying to find it and asked countless people countless times if they had seen it.
Eventually, I had all of my credit cards and debit cards canceled; however, for a while, I debated whether or not to do so. No one had charged anything to my accounts, and maybe, I hoped, an honest person was in the process of returning my wallet to me.
But patience is dangerous in such scenarios, and I decided it was best to just cancel all of my cards and be safe.
As students, we have to be especially careful about family credit cards under our parents’ names, because all of the cards share the same card number, making fraud that much easier. Fraudsters, by just knowing where you live and your last name, can figure out the names of all the people in your family through Web sites such as whitepages.com. Only blocking the card that was stolen or lost is futile in this case, because any person can just go online and look for your mom and dad’s names and charge whatever he wants under them.
It’s scary to realize how easy it is for dishonest people to get access to your accounts. Technology makes things more convenient, but at a price. I once heard a story about a thief who broke into a car, and using the car’s GPS system (which had directions to the car owner’s home) drove to the car owner’s empty house, then proceeded to rob the house. He loaded all the stuff into the stolen car and drove away.
Hearing stories like these can make anyone really paranoid. How many of you, in your cell phones, have “Mom” and “Dad” labeled in your contacts, not their actual names? Losing your cell phone can potentially be a huge disaster, especially if you have a texting relationship with your parents. Any dishonest person can easily text to your dad, “What are the last 4 digits for your Social Security number? I need to check something with our Verizon account,” and before you know it, the person has access to almost everything — your family’s phone account, credit cards (assuming he also has your card) and anything else that uses your father’s Social Security number.
Ever since I lost my wallet, I’ve been imagining all the possible things that a dishonest person can do with it — from using my driver’s license to charging on my cards. It is times like these that I wished my wallet had a GPS tracking system and a password lock on it. Someone should invent something like that to protect a careless person like me.
What really sucks is that I lost my wallet and my Binghamton ID during the beginning of the weekend. Since it’s impossible to get a replacement until after the weekend, you basically can’t get into your building or eat (unless you have a really nice friend/roommate or have enough food in the fridge to sustain you for a little while).
In the end, I just miss my wallet. I don’t even care if it is returned to me empty. I canceled all the cards — they should be useless to any dishonest person by now. I just want to know what ultimately happened to it. For all I know, my wallet could be sitting in a garbage dump, to be never seen again. If not, maybe someone is using my driver’s license as a fake ID or driving recklessly under my identity or worse: looking up my name online to find more information about me.
All this talk about fraud makes you think there are no honest people in this world; however, I’ve had countless friends who lost their BU cards and wallets only to have them returned shortly afterward by an honest person. So don’t lose your hope on humanity just yet. But it’s always better to be safe than sorry, and to take the necessary precautions.