I was surprised yesterday to find that the USPS was notifying me of my mailing around 20 packages via my online account. I had never done that.
I immediately called my credit card company to dispute the charges. They said that none of them had shown up. I put a hold on it anyway.
I went to my USPS account, changed my password, and removed my credit card from it. The packages were listed, all sent to an address in Elizabeth, NJ. The recipient’s name was gibberish, but they were listed as coming from my address.
When I finally got in touch with the USPS (after an hour and a half on hold :eek:), they checked. The postage had been ordered – but not with my credit card.
I then checked my annual credit report. No new cards were listed (my wife was worried that someone had used us to get a credit card and were testing to see if it worked). But there was one strange anomaly: I was listed as having another address (in addition to my own) somewhere in California. I immediately disputed it and asked that it be changed.
I think I’m probably in the clear, but I’m just wondering what could have happened. Some ideas I’ve had:
- It was for some other USPS account, but their software listed mine since they were using my address (Not impossible, but I doubt they’d work things that way).
- Someone hacked my USPS account. (Possible, but why didn’t they use the credit card that was there?)
- They used my return address because they were sending something illegal (the gibberish name for the addressee rings alarms) and hoped that, if caught, they’d come to me (But that still leaves #1).
- The extra return address was just an error unrelated to the rest (likely, but the timing seems odd; the address seemed to have been added recently).
Anyone have any better ideas?