Email Elizabethcitibank custom credit line unauthorized
Identity Theft Protection Options When Buying a Home
Identity theft protection might help when buying a home.
Anybody who is buying a home in Sacramento might want to consider signing up for a free trial run of credit monitoring and fraud detection, including identity theft protection, before applying for a loan and while your mortgage is in process. Because it seems every time you turn around, some agency is getting hacked. The I.R.S. has had to send out thousands of letters to citizens informing us that some of our data might have been exposed. The New York Times say the IRS hacking is worse than reported. If your major corporations, your banking institutions and your government are not secure, what is?
About a year ago when Home Depot was breached, part of the settlement was to provide its recent customers with a free one-year subscription to credit monitoring and identity theft protection. This is how I became registered with such a company because it would never occur to me to sign up otherwise. Yesterday the company called to say new credit information showed up on my credit report and asked if I had initiated such a thing.
Now, those of you who follow my blogs might recall the situation with a Citibank Custom Credit Line. This happened about a month ago when Citibank mailed a 12-page letter without an account number or other identifying information apart from my name and address to inform me a Custom Credit Line had been opened in my name. Without my permission nor knowledge. I spoke to a supervisor and demanded they reverse the Citibank Custom Credit Line without affecting my credit. In other words, I did not want the account merely closed, I expected it to vanish, and was assured it would happen.
The reason the credit monitoring company called was to inform me that Citibank had placed a new account on my credit report for its Custom Credit Line. Granted, the date I received the letter was August 17th, and yesterday was September 11th, so almost a month had passed. The company asked if I had opened the account. After I explained that not only did I not open the account, it was not supposed to show up on my credit report. That’s when they told me it had also been closed on my report.
Good news is the identity theft company is able to remove it all together from my report. They are also placing fraud protection on my account for free for 90 days. It can be extended for 7 years, they promise, if I file a police report against Citibank, which I will gladly do. Citibank had no legal right to do what it did. They also suggested I deal directly with TransUnion because of the 3 reporting agencies, TransUnion is the most consumer friendly. Good tips, I’d say.
I can’t recommend the best identity theft protection company to you; you’ll have to do your own online research, but it seems that Consumer Reports ranks Identity Guard as #1, followed by Identity Force as #2 and Lifelock trailing as #3.
Any consumer agency, though, will tell you that the best identity theft prevention is you. Use common sense. Don’t access your banking accounts from a public WiFi. Put credit alerts on your personal accounts. Change your passwords often, and make them complicated. And remember, during the mortgage process to buy a home, you don’t want anything to mess up your credit reports. Besides pulling your free credit report from Annualcreditreport.com., you might want to sign up for a trial basis for an identity theft protection. Just record the data so you can stop the service prior to being charged for a full year if you find you no longer want it.
All information is secure online until the day it isn’t.
Your Sacramento Realtor Should Rise Above the Incompetency Plague
Incompetency is not a foreign concept in any profession
I am a Sacramento Realtor my clients can rely upon. That is not a statement I take lightly because, believe me, I have my share of interactions with others that seem to be plagued by incompetency, like it’s a disease that spreads. Things fall through the cracks. People don’t do their jobs or are inept at their jobs, and it can be frustrating. I never want a client to say their experience with me was frustrating or that I let them down.
It’s not uncommon to hear agents say the reason they went into Sacramento real estate was because their previous agents were idiots, and they want to protect others from their own bad experiences. I can understand that. There are times I have to do the other agent’s job in a transaction, and I just do it for them without expectation that I will receive an acknowledgment of gratitude.
I’m always looking for ways things can go wrong and trying to prevent those things from happening. I think ahead. I can’t say it’s not unnerving at times, but giving into frustration doesn’t solve the issues at hand. My sister says I have the optimistic energy level of a 5-year-old, which sort of threw me for a loop because I don’t see myself that way, but perhaps in comparison to her low-key approach, I do.
There are times I do not trust any professional’s competence. Like last Friday, I was at the hospital for a routine examination, waiting in a small room without any magazines nor cellphone reception. After 20 minutes went by, I poked my head out the door. The hall was empty. No folder was attached to my door. I roused a hospital employee to go on the hunt for my folder. She returned laughing that it had been placed on the wrong desk. I shudder to think how long I would have sat in that room if I hadn’t spoken up. Incompetency.
Or yesterday, when I came home to discover the plumber who was supposed to have installed a new control board in our Rheem tankless water heater had left, and we still had no hot water pressure and the control panel was dead. I did not want to have to figure out the problem nor read the installation manual, yet I did. I had to call the plumber back to install the programmer chip. I don’t want to know these things. I don’t want to do a plumber’s job. Incompetency.
When I spotted the plumber outside thumbing through the pages of the tankless water heater manual and looking puzzled, I went one step further and called Rheem to get a tech on the line who could walk my plumber through the installation process. Incompetency. The control panel is now working but the hot water flow fluctuates and, since it was 5 PM at Rheem, the tech claimed it was a plumbing issue not a tank issue and hung up.
I opened my mail last night to discover that Citibank has approved me for a special loan that I did not apply for. Plus, buried in its 12 pages, I see it plans to charge me an annual $50 fee for this Custom Credit Line I did not apply for nor authorize. I called customer service, some yo-yo in another state, who said I must have wandered into a branch office by mistake and opened the loan in error when I haven’t been to Citibank. Incompetency. Probably violates banking laws, too.
Given the above string of incompetencies that seem to unfold daily, you can see that I don’t mind tracking down another agent’s lender and sending the contracts she should have sent. Because it’s all around us. However, I can assure you, a client will never say these sorts of things about my services as a Sacramento Realtor.
