OMG how bad is this?!

crazyfj

i don't really agree with some off above, in this day and age you have to be very careful. identity thief is rife, it just takes your statement to get into the wrong hands!

i trust my bank with my details, and I would consider this to be a mistake.

MABLE

crazyfj wrote: »

i don't really agree with some off above, in this day and age you have to be very careful. identity thief is rife, it just takes your statement to get into the wrong hands!

i trust my bank with my details, and I would consider this to be a mistake.

Well on this occasion let us all be thankful the statements went to an upstanding member of the community and with that thought we can all sleep peacefully in our beds tonight!

NovaBlack_2

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

very little because the other 3 won't get a letter saying 'sorry you haven't received your statement it was sent to somebody else', so they won't have a clue. They'll phone the bank and say they haven't received their statement assuming it got lost in the post and all 3 people won't know the other 2 haven't received theirs.

hmm just playin devils advocate here... but theyl know if either:

A) the person who recieves all the statements contacts any of the others - hopefully!

or

that suddenly hundreds of pounds go missing from their accounts... identity fraud IS COMMON despite what people seem to think

Jennifer_Jane

MABLE wrote: »

No doubt the other two who never received their statements will be giving grieve to Royal Mail. However mistakes do happen in every walk of life and all we can do is learn from the errors and try to make sure they do not happen again. Thats probably why they don't hang people anymore because the error rate was too high. Now that is really something to be horrified about!

Well, I agree with you, except no-one is saying how anyone is learning anything from this. If you can, that's great. I look forward to hearing from you.

Re the various comparisons that have been given on this thread, from removing the wrong kidney, or the one above, about hanging people to getting dirt on someone's gardening jeans, well, of course, this fits somewhere in the middle of all that. No-one is saying that this is a tragedy, but the OP was 'horrified' and I think s/he has a right to be 'horrified'. If not 'horrified' then definitely anxious.

We are just very lucky if no-one has actually removed money from our accounts when credit card statements have been included in other people's statements.

Jen

amandada

I hope you'll be charging the bank a ridiculous amount of money for your "admin" in sorting out THEIR c*ck up-they're quick enough to charge customers!

Very_Poor

I recently applied for a career development loan and all I had to send was a letter from a government department and statements. The letter didn't even have a header so I could have typed it up myself and the statements could have been someone else's I got in the post by accident...

IvanOpinion

Jennifer_Jane wrote: »

I agree that it is a simple mistake - but the point is not about paranoia or the media or anything - where has that come from, but the point that some people on this forum were quite dismissive of the OP.

Maybe your point is about other peoples comments, mine was about the growing paranoia about someone else seeing your credit card statement ... so what if someone sees you shop in Tesco, Amazon, had a meal in Pizza Hut etc.

Clearly, they and you, haven't grasped the point that people who have your credit card number can obviously use the details to remove money from your credit card account (as I said I have about £10000 on my RSA credit card - I get pretty good interest on it), and nowhere is this more untraceable (ie I know I buy online, give my card to restaurants, etc), than when your credit card number has been sent to a complete stranger.

My credit limit is significantly more than yours, I have had my statement sent to the wrong person .. I was contacted by them in a state of paranoia induced panic .. I calmed them down and told them to simply pop my bill in the post to me. Yes there is a tiny tiny chance that I could have been unlucky enough for the bill to have been sent to someone looking to steal an identity .. but then again I see no sense in crying over spilt milk .. mop it up and forget about it .. in my case I contacted the credit card company to let them know what had happened (as had the person who received my bill), they gave me a gesture of godwill (unasked for), they asked a few pertinent questions about anticipated spending, said they would monitor my acount or would issue me with a new number ... I went with the monitoring.

I also agree that there is nothing you can do about this, and I am prepared to agree, although I don't know for a fact, that these incidents may be unusual.

This can occasionally happen on a very very small percentage of runs sending bills out to thousands of people. While the equipment that prints, folds, stuffs and seals is the best available it can occasionally miss a beat for loads of different reasons and the first the company will know about it is when an honest person contacts them and mentions it.

Nevertheless, to compare this with getting a bit of dirt on your gardening jeans is puerile. But, OK you're a very relaxed kind of person, so good for you and I sincerely wish I had your confidence.

You are letting the paranoia set in again

Ivan

Jennifer_Jane

'My credit limit is significantly more than yours' -

Cheeky thing! How do you know? I never told you what my credit limit was, I just said that I had the equivalent of £10000 on this card - as I said, I get a really good interest rate from the credit card, and have (luckily, with the markets crashing around us) parked some funds on the card, so the person who received my credit card statement could easily have used the details and disappeared into the ether.

What shall I do if I get your statement with your oh so high credit limit!! :undecided Off to Nigeria, I think!


No, of course, not, that would be dishonest

Jen

IvanOpinion

Jennifer_Jane wrote: »

'My credit limit is significantly more than yours' -

Cheeky thing! How do you know? I never told you what my credit limit was, I just said that I had the equivalent of £10000 on this card - as I said, I get a really good interest rate from the credit card, and have (luckily, with the markets crashing around us) parked some funds on the card, so the person who received my credit card statement could easily have used the details and disappeared into the ether.

What shall I do if I get your statement with your oh so high credit limit!! :undecided Off to Nigeria, I think!


No, of course, not, that would be dishonest

Jen

You only mentioned £10K of credit which is pretty 'normal' these days ... apologies if you find such a low limit embarassing . Despite the amount of credit that I am offered (which is nothing extaordinary), I, like many, clear the account off monthly since I am not willing to waste good money on paying the extortionate interest charged by credit companies .. therefore I would never put more than £5-6K on my cards per month.

Identity theft is a problem, however the chances of it being caused by a statement going to the wrong person is probably negligible compared to the other 'stupid' ways that people allow it to happen. Keep it in perspective and try not to get all hyper over simple, easily resolved, honest, mistakes ... we have become far too paranoid in this country.

Last nght I received two phone calls from two different companies trying to sell me identity theft insurance protection ... looks like somebody is feeding off the growing paranoia.

Ivan