Week #2- Identity Theft (Chapter 1)

Identity theft is something that I absolutely HATE!! Working at the bank for the past 5 years, it's something that I see so often and it just aggrevates me just to think that someone can take advantage of another person just like that. I don't understand why they can't put themselves in that other person's shoe and have their money taken away.

According to the book, identity theft is when someone steals your identifying information and impersonates you in trasactions with various stores and institutions.

How does this relate to my own experience?? Well, fortunately, I haven't experienced identity theft myself but I have watched many of my clients go through it. For example, I have an elderly client who gets her retirement checks every month and comes into the bank to withdraw a majority of it in order to pay some of her bills. Well, she came into the branch one day and to her dismay, all of her money was gone and she had owed the bank over $500 in overdraft fees. We found out that someone had stolen checks that had been sent back to her house (old checks that have cleared her account) and had washed them so that they could write in the amount they wanted to cash the check for. The signature on the checks stayed the same so that when the individual trying to cash the check at the bank came in, the teller saw that the signatures matched and didn't have to think about the check being fradulent.

Just seeing my client go through such hardship is so hurtful because it's something that goes on all the time. My grandma is her age and I know that if my grandma was to go a month without any income, it would kill her because in our economy today, money is something that we all need in order to survive. We feel violated when our prized possessions have been taken away from us and for a couple of months, there is nothing that we can do.