ID Theft Part III

Since all Rm113 posts are essential to living the good life, feel free to now go back to ID Theft Parts I and II so that you are adequately caught up. No? You don't care? Fine...

After approximately 30 excruciatingly painful hours (yes, I've kept count) on the phone with almost-English speaking folks from certainly all parts of the world, I'm hesitantly excited to declare that the ID theft issues appear to be mostly resolved. (Has anyone ever used that many adjectives in a sentence before?) I recently received documents, from both Dell and Sprint, informing me that I didn't open the accounts and therefore will not be held liable for the value of the stolen goods. Good thing they told me I didn't do it, cause I was starting to think I was a criminal.

Dealing with the Cincinnati Police has actually not been horrible. The detective on the case has been incredibly candid with me about everything and has been very thankful for all the info I dragged out of Dell and Sprint, which made his job much easier. The detective emailed me today for a variety of reasons, one of which was to let me know that they have a suspect in the theft. If they can find the guy and convict him, he's looking at "grand larceny" on his record, as the value of stolen goods in this case alone is over $2500.
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One last little nugget before I hopefully am done with this case for good... between Dell and Sprint, I bet I've made around 50 phone calls trying to clear my name. I started every single call with some variation of "there's an account open in my name and social security number, but I didn't open it... in fact, I've never had an account with your company..." And yet somehow, at the end of every call, the CSR says to me, "thank you for choosing Dell" or "thank you for choosing Sprint, now together with Nextel, have a nice day." All but one time, I chuckled and blew it off...

But there was this one call with Sprint... oh boy... when I found out Sprint had charged me a $200 cancellation fee for breaking the 2-year contract before it was up on a phone contract that I was "cancelling" because it was fraudulent... somehow I kept my cool through all of that and remained polite and professional...

At the end of that FIFTY MINUTE phone call (including 35 minutes on hold) with the most unhelpful of all unhelpful call center workers, the girl told me that she could not connect me to her manager and that I would have to call back some other time... she still had the nerve to say "thank you for choosing Sprint..." and I had had enough:

"I DID NOT CHOOSE SPRINT, I HAVE NEVER CHOSEN SPRINT, AND I NEVER WILL CHOOSE SPRINT..." and unfortunately I didn't end there. If I didn't make that poor girl cry and quit her job, nothing ever will. I later had to repent for my language, which was certainly full of 4-letter-words used as nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, prepositions, and other sentence construction items that I cannot remember.

At least it's over...