Backstory: Until her death at age 101 last month, Mom was residing in a care home. I had been managing her affairs, including her finances, for the past 3-4 years. The only bank accounts that Mom had were two savings accounts and a checking account, and she did not have online access to any account. All of her mail was held at the care home for me to pick up.
Twice within a month last fall, Mom received letters from national banks; one from Chase and one from Wells Fargo. Both of the letters were addressed to the apartment that Mom occupied (within the care home) until 3 years ago. Both letters thanked her for her interest in applying online to open a checking account. And both banks turned down the application because they weren’t able to verify her identity, and they didn’t like what they heard back from Experian. They politely asked her to apply for a new account in person at one of their branches.
I made half-hearted attempts to contact both banks, but couldn’t get past the opening menu without an active account. As soon as I received the first letter, I changed my online password to her accounts and began monitoring them each day. I saw no suspicious activity.
Obviously, somebody had attempted to open accounts in Mom’s name, using a 3-year-old address. The Bad Person almost certainly had Mom’s SSN, as one cannot get past the account-opening page without a valid Social. The account-opening process also calls for a driver’s license number or State ID card number, which Mom had. I guess somebody might have gotten that number as well by looking in Mom’s wallet. But you also need some money to open a new checking account.
I cannot figure out why somebody would do this, and to what end? If the Bad Person was indeed able to open an account in Mom’s name, what would be the next step? Bad Person would ‘own’ that new account which was funded by his/her money, but he/she still wouldn’t have access to any of Mom’s other accounts.
It could be scammers in other countries trying to set up accounts in the US to use for US-based scams. It’s easier to convince someone in the US to send money to a Chase account rather than some bank in Nigeria.
For example, a common scam is for a scammer to woo someone on a dating site for the purposes of getting money from them. After some feelings develop, the scammer asks for money for a plane ticket to see the person. Or the scammer gives the person some sob story about how they are going to get kicked out of their home because they can’t pay the rent. A US-based account will work much better for that scam to avoid making the person suspicious.
One thing you may want to do is pull a credit report for your mom. You can get a free one from this FTC link:
You can pull the report from the three major credit agencies. See if there are any suspicious accounts. I’m not sure if accounts can stay active after the person has passed away. I don’t think accounts are closed automatically. Even in typical circumstances, it will be normal to have account activity as the executor processes the estate. If scammers had opened accounts with other banks, those accounts might still be active.
It could be the beginnings of identity theft. That’s how I found out mine had been stolen. I got a letter from Home Depot saying they were unable to open an account without more information. Of course I never tried to open an account. Then came the account overdue letters from Apple and others.
Change passwords, monitor credit reports. Watch the mail for more letters.
Did your Mom have any credit cards? Tens of millions of credit card accounts have been compromised in hacking attacks on major retailers. My own information including birthdate and social security number have been available on the dark web since 1998. Just last month, someone applied for an $80,000 SBA loan in the name of my defunct computer business. I had to freeze my credit with all three credit reporting agencies.
The next step is to open a credit card in her name, borrow money from the card, and buy stuff. There’s worse things that can be done with credit, but other types of credit typically require a lot of verification.
(For instance, someone with access to my credit report could open a credit card in my name, but not a line of credit since that requires employment information.)
But I suppose that information could have been hacked while the card was still active. That would actually account for the 2-year-old address and possibly knowing her SSN.
You might try to contact the 3 credit bureaus and ask them the best thing to do. If you are lucky enough to get a live, human person, they might suggest putting a hold (freeze?) on the account, or maybe something better under the circumstances. A freeze would mean that the credit info will not be given out so freely, and if you have a power of attorney, you will be notified about any application, not just the rejected ones. And close all of her accounts as soon as her estate business is concluded or if they are no longer needed.
Which is exactly what I am going to do at the end of this month, once all the automatic transactions are concluded. On 2/1/22, there will be nothing in her name or Social.
Your suggestion of contacting the credit bureaus and trying to talk to somebody is a good one. I’ll make some calls tomorrow. Thanks.
This is my thought - use the account to get a credit card, or get overdraft protection and overdraw, or establish a track record with a chequing account and then write some big cheques.
I still wonder that nobody said “hey, wait a minute, this lady is 100 years old!!” Don’t most applications want details like date of birth (or is that not roughly evident from social security number?)
Reminds me of the stories of illegal immigrants working using the SSN of some 90-year-old. Doesn’t someone notice that sort of discrepancy?
The fact that they were both declined specifically because they couldn’t verify her identity suggest that they may not have actually had this information. Since Experian is involved, they may have had her SSN, but it’s possible they just put a random string of characters into the DL field hoping that it would go through.
My business is in the middle of dealing with our ‘identity’ being stolen. So far, three checks have been drawn off our account that we didn’t write.
Now, I’ve always made the comment that if I hand you a check with someone else’s name on it, you’re going to have a hard time cashing it. But I just can’t believe* someone would be stupid enough to forge a check, from a business, which will almost certainly regularly reconcile their accounts and catch it, in their own name. It would trace right back to them. When these forged checks started popping up, I had a theory that whoever stole (or has) our checking account information simply opened a checking account in the name of the person they made the check out to. Use a mobile app to deposit the check and then transfer the money out of the account in a way that would make it difficult to track (or at least do anything about).
That is to say, it’s possible that someone setting up a fake checking account was going to use it to deposit fake checks.
*Re not believing that someone would forge a check in their own name. I haven’t figured out what they’ve done yet. It would make a whole lot more sense to use a BS name, right. However, out of the three checks, one of them is made out to, signed and endorsed by the same person, the other two are not signed with the same name as they’re made out to…all of them made out to different people. That’s 5 different names across three checks. When I look up all these names on facebook, many (all?) of them have at least one FB friend with the same/similar name as one of the remaining 4 people.
It could be that the identities of all these people were all stolen and all used in the same scam, maybe due to a breach with a service they all used (ie church, gym etc…they’re all local people). It could even be purely coincidental. Some of these people have thousands of friends which makes for better odds that there’s someone on their friend list with the same name as someone else involved.
But, more and more, it seems like someone or multiple someones are using their real names to deposit the checks. Just far too many coincidences.
I think most basic credit card applications are mainly automated.
Banks aren’t allowed to discriminate based on age. This means near retirement age can acquire mortgages that they won’t be able to pay once they retire.
I think the big question isn’t so much how they’d open a credit card but why they’d open a checking account.
It’s like the difference between me robbing your house vs breaking in so I can keep my valuables in a box on your kitchen table. It might work for a few hours, but as soon as you notice it you’re going to alert the authorities and give them the box of stuff. The only way it would make sense is if you were using it as a drop point for someone else to grab.
Kinda like setting up a checking account to deposit forged checks into with the intent of transferring the money back out as soon as it clears.
This is a possibility. Deposit cheques, The account includes a bank card, so then use an ATM to pull out the money. What sort of daily withdrawal limits do most banks have nowadays? The moment the ATM takes more than 2 minutes to release the card and cough out the money, get the hell outta there and use a different account. I guess, best case, they churn a bit of money for a while to get the bank to trust them. If they use forged cheques from a business, it may take to the end of the month reconciliation to discover the fraud, especially if the business account has a lot of money and won’t miss a few thousand. So the cheques clear at first, and you withdraw the maximum each day.
(I remember a scam I read in the early days of ATM’s, the guy created a number of accounts, and kited cheques between them to establish trust. Then he took one weekend to withdraw as much as he could from every account using deposited but un-cleared cheques. The only gotcha - he was stupid enough to use his real name?)
My issue with the ATM is that they (usually) have cameras. If I was involved in this, I certainly wouldn’t want to be doing any of this under video surveillance. But using paypal to send it to someone in another country or coverting it to crypto may work, if for no other reason because I’m guessing it’s not going to be followed up on in any meaningful way. Unless there’s a lot of money involved, it wouldn’t surprise me if whoever was looking into it saw the money leave the country or turn into crypto, they’d probably call it a dead end.
I’m up to $8000 and if the police are working on it, they haven’t filled me in. The bank refunded all the money, so I’m not out anything, but I’d still like to see the people get caught.
Unrelated, but my bank also seemed pretty happy at how quickly I reported it to them, usually within a few hours of it showing up on my online account. Since it was less than 24hours, they could simply return the check to the bank that cashed it. Now I have my money (which I would get back regardless), my bank has their money and it’s up to Capital One to recover it from whoever deposited it into one of their accounts, otherwise they’re out of luck.