You just got lucky and caught it early.
I've been curious about the real-world impacts of identity theft for quite some time. In the article linked, the author's only obvious losses were a) on the home mortgage (couldn't cosign; worse rate) and b) at the airport, with TSA (which I don't get; how did his credit rating have an impact on the secondary security screening?).
It's unclear to me why I should care that much about identity theft, or what a thief can do. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a huge hassle to get calls from scammed creditors or be unable to obtain consumer credit, but I am fortunate enough not to need credit and I already have the credit cards and bank accounts I need.
There is the whole IRS fraudulent return thing, which could be quite tedious to sort out and meantime would take real money. But that's about all I can think of unless you need consumer credit.
> It's unclear to me... what a thief can do.
Um... well... how about anything you can do with your identity, except it's someone else? Do you really not understand why that's a bad thing?
Hmm, I don't know, to be honest. That hadn't occurred to me.
> I think you understand perfectly well the problems identity theft can cause, but you're just being intentionally obtuse.
Huh? No, I was asking a question. Why would someone be intentionally obtuse about something like this? I can't figure out how my comment was misinterpreted, but it certainly was. I apologize for my lack of clarity in the original post.
> Um... well... how about anything you can do with your identity, except it's someone else? Do you really not understand why that's a bad thing?
"Anything you can do" isn't very clear, hence my desire to understand the threat better. Assuming I have no need for consumer credit (like, actual loans), it's just not clear to me in which cases a bad credit score can be a problem. Auto insurance had not occurred to me, so thanks for that example.
Once again, I think you may have misinterpreted my comment in some manner. Do people really troll each other over, like, identity theft? Weird. But I wasn't. :)
That person is never helpful to the discussion.
A single anecdote of good fortune carries exactly as much weight as a single anecdote of misfortune.
The banks kicked him back and he tried forging checks from others (not me).
I filed the reports with the police. And checked my credit. Nothing serious happened as he seems to have been pretty much thwarted by most places he went.
But then he got caught when he was pulled over for having a brake light out.
All in all I suffered no real harm from this guy. Seems like for the most part the system works...