A scheme full of surprises - He never knows when collectors may call or more charges appear

July 3, 2005 - Times-Dispatch

These days, C.S. Kessler of Richmond never knows when his phone rings late at night or early in the morning if a bill collector will be on the line demanding payment on yet another account he knows nothing about.

Or when he will receive another threatening form letter.             Or if he will get rejected when he applies for new credit.            Or learn that his address has been mysteriously changed on one of his accounts.

"I'm an ID-theft victim," said Kessler, a retired law enforcement officer for the Richmond sheriff's office.  "It seems to just never stop," he said.

"I know for a fact that I am a victim of identity theft when I look at my credit accounts and see accounts that I had nothing to do with. I'd sometimes wake up to the sound of the phone ringing at, say, 6:30 in the morning and it was a bill collector on the phone," he said.

Bill collectors called about accounts they claim he opened.

When he calls creditors directly to discuss the matter, they refuses to discuss it by phone because he can not provide the identifying information used to open the account.

He can't, he said, because he did not open the accounts.

Aside from getting strange phone calls from bill collectors beginning sometime in 2003, Kessler said he sometimes discovered that balances on his legitimate accounts "had grown rather dramatically even as I kept paying more and more" on them.

Having been a law enforcement official for 26½ years, he knew to ask for statements and for signed copies of invoices from the creditor. But "they refused to send them. They claimed they already did and that's all I was going to get."

One creditor, a bank, took him to civil court in Richmond over a past-due balance of more than $3,500, he said. When the bank did not produce the documentation requested by the court, the case was dismissed.

"There have been a few others that popped up" on his credit reports, he said. But, unlike the other accounts, payments were actually made by somebody on those.

"I knew nothing about them, and that's scary."

Donald Gerard, a spokesman at Experian, the California-based credit-reporting agency, said identity thieves "will make minimum payments to delay the recognition that something is wrong."

On two accounts that Kessler did open, he said his billing address was mysteriously changed, which resulted in missed monthly statements.

That's a classic tactic used by identity thieves to take over the account undetected by the account holder, Gerard said.

Right now, things are "a lot quieter than they were since I challenged some of these things," Kessler said.

"I'm only being harassed by one collector," he said.

But he spoke too soon. A day or so later, a previous collector on a disputed account "popped back up" with a demand for more than $6,200 on an account that Kessler said should be about $750.

Kessler said he has filed police reports several times, most recently in April.

He monitors his credit reports regularly now.