My husband recently signed up to start getting Social Security. The first payment was due in our account last week, but we never got it.
Contacted Social Security – what happened was someone opened a bank account with Bank of America, using my husband’s name and SSN, and directed the payment to be made there. We do not now or ever have had a B of A bank account. (Might have had a credit card from them many years ago; no longer remember.)
My husband had set up payment to be made to a different bank, one we’ve been a customer of for years. This setup was done over the phone – we tried to make a face-to-face appointment with SSA, but they apparently don’t do that for setting up benefits.
The rep at SSA told him this afternoon when he met with them (now that the pooch has been screwed they were willing to meet F2F) that no changes were made on his MySocialSecurity online account. I guess this means they did this over the phone? Or by mail?
Anyway, they’ll cut us a check which we should receive in 90 days, and payments should commence to our actual bank account next month.
The rep said that probably the thief set up the B of A account, then withdrew the payment and closed the account. He suggested we get in contact with B of A and report the situation. We will do so tomorrow. Do we need to worry about the same thief doing this with another bank for his August or any future payments?
How worried do we need to be in general? Clearly some thief has his SSN. (We froze our credit years ago. I assume that absent some action on our part, it’s still frozen?) What steps should we take?
Do we need to report this incident to law enforcement? If so, to whom? Local police? FBI? Both?
Does Bank of America have any liability here? Is there any requirement that they check to assure that the name on the account and the person who opened the account are one and the same?
File a police report so that it was officially on record, especially since there is concern it could happen again.
Set up a PIN with the IRS to prevent fraudulent tax returns being filed since they have his social security number. Here’s the IRS FAQ.
Double-check that the credit freezes are still in place. Depending on what state you live in, the freeze can fall off after 7 years. They are easy to set up and manage online for all three major bureaus. It wouldn’t hurt to pull a credit report to make sure nothing has snuck in just in case.
Place a freeze through ChexSystems, which is an entity that participating banks report checking accounts to, report individuals that have delinquent accounts, etc. You can freeze it here and you can also request a free report to see if any other unknown accounts have been opened. Not all banks use ChexSystems so it isn’t fool-proof, but most do.
Request a copy of your LexusNexis report (here), which may also help you identify any fraudulent accounts or information.
If not, it’s attempted [blank] or, at worst, the opening of a fraudulent account but without theft. In other words, pretty minor overall and not likely to get much/any law enforcement follow up. ‘The system worked.’ It’s also not clear who the victim is.
Everyone who is getting close to retirement age, and a few years before, should set up and account with Social Security. You can monitor any activity on your account. Do not wait until you need the money.
File a police report, this a fraud and probably grand larceny depending upon the amount of money. One month’s SS payment stolen qualifies.
Go after the bank that screwed up, not by contacting them but contact the SEC, Securitys and Exchange Commission. File a formal complaint with them, then tell the bank that you did so. Nothing like a government watch dog making a few phone calls to get things cleared up fast.
I don’t think you realize how serious this could be, and anny_m’s husband is most definitely a victim of identity theft. A fraudulent bank account was opened and that could have major impacts on anny_m’s husband. If the scammer wrote a bunch of hot checks and bails, guess who the bank is going after? anny_m’s husband, because as far as they know he is legally responsible for the account. There are potential impacts to their credit reports, and if the bank reports them to ChexSystems then their own bank could fire them as a client and they could have a hard time opening a new one. Sure they’ll be able to fight it and eventually get it resolved, but do you have any idea how many hours of time spread over months or years it can take to get it all cleaned up?
Also, the point of the police report isn’t to get law enforcement to go catch the baddies (because you are right, they probably aren’t going to even bother to try). But it starts a legal paper trail that will help protect them, particularly if it happens more than once.
We went to Bank of America today to file a fraud report. Social Security had given us a number which we believe is the B of A account to which the payment was deposited. The nice man at B of A checked the account number, verified that it was a B of A account, but said the account was not in my husband’s name, nor did it have his SSN on it. (SSA had told us the account was in his name and had his SSN.) For privacy reasons he could give us no other information. He did verify that there is no B of A account with husband’s SSN. I didn’t think to ask if he could find out if they had a closed account with his SSN.
So now we have no clear idea what happened. Is Bank of America trying to weasel out of a problem by blaming SS? Did someone at Social Security screw up and they are trying to blame B of A? Neither of these options strike me as impossible.
We did go to our local police department, explaining that we wanted to file a report – not with the idea they’d do anything, but so that if it does turn out to be a big problem we could truthfully say that we did file a police report. The officer basically said that since it is uncertain fraud occurred they can’t really do a fraud report. The thing is we may not actually be out any money in the long run, since SSA told us they’d cut a check within 90 days. If we have any other problems the police will do a fraud report post-haste.
Many,many thanks to Iiirogue for the advice. (I’d quote that post, but my “quote in reply” doesn’t seem to be working.) As I said above, we did at least try to file a police report this afternoon. I checked with the credit entities this morning and our credit freezes are still in place. I’ll do the IRS PIN, ChexSystems freeze and LexusNexis report tomorrow.
Dallas_Jones had good advice about setting up an account with Social Security. My husband did that earlier this year. I think we were naive in that we didn’t check the myssa.gov site to assure that the SSA rep input our banking info correctly. We never received any notification that our data had changed (and the SSA rep my husband met with yesterday said that the banking information wasn’t changed on myssa.gov). I’m thinking this may be an indication that the whole problem is a giant screw-up by our local SSA office – but maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
One other thing I’ll do tomorrow is to write up a summary of the situation and send it to Social Security in Washington. We have nothing in writing about any of this, and this would at least be something. I may be paranoid, but I found myself wondering if we don’t receive a check from them that they’ll claim they never told us we would or that we never told them we didn’t get the July payment.