A recent stunt by Rob Cockerham, who is the operator of a site by the name of Cockeyed.com, illustrated just how much you need to go out of your way to protect yourself from fraudulent activity taking place in your name.
This fact alone may be enough to make you feel a bit surprised when I tell you that he received a card from the application – without receiving so much as a phone call from the credit card company to confirm the application. But, in reality, it gets far worse.
Taping the application back together wasn’t enough for Cockerham. He also put a different address on the application than the address from which it was sent and he made arrangements for the activation of the card to take place through his cell phone rather than the phone number the company had listed on its records.
Can you believe that he received the card without a hitch? It’s mindboggling to me that the company wouldn’t at least call and make some sort of confirmation to avoid scams before sending off the card, particularly with some many things going on with the card that you would think would make the application quite suspicious.
The most ironic part? As with most credit card companies, Chase suggests ripping up the applications if you are not interested in receiving the card being offered. I guess that advice holds very little water since a taped up application is good enough for processing.
I recently applied for and received a Discover Card after receiving an application in the mail. I applied for the card online with the confirmation code supplied with the invitation and was very pleasantly surprised to receive a phone call from Discover verifying that I had actually applied for the card. While it was a bit of an inconvenience, I was happy to see that Discover was willing to take such an extra step in order to keep people’s identities just a little better protected. It seems to me that more issuers should do the same.
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