Even torn-up credit applications are unsafe
Posted: Tue Mar 14, 2006 11:28 am
A friend of mine recommended this tactic instead:
Take the application, take a big red magic marker and put a huge X on the application and write REFUSED. Put it in the prepaid envelope and mail it back. They have to pay the postage and pay someone to open that envelope. They dont send too many unsolicited offers after that.
"What if a desperate identity thief digging through your trash found a credit card application ripped into little pieces, taped it back together, filled it out and mailed it in? Would he get the credit card?
The answer, according to one man's experiment, is clearly yes.
Rob Cockerham is a credit card company's nightmare -- in this case, JP Morgan Chase & Co.'s nightmare. Armed with a roll of tape, a digital camera, a blog, a lot of irritation about those unsolicited credit card offers and a rapier wit, Cockerham set out to embarrass the company's credit card division about one month ago.
It was that mountain of credit card applications, so familiar to any adult American with a wallet, that drove Cockerham to perform his experiment.
"I get a heck of a lot of credit card applications in the mail," he writes. "I almost always tear them in half and throw them away. Sometimes, if I am feeling particularly paranoid, I'll tear them into little bitty pieces." But, he wonders in the blog, "Is that good enough?"
So he mimicked the steps an ID thief might take. He performed reconstructive surgery on a Chase MasterCard credit card application with Scotch tape. For good measure, he changed the address on the application, to see if Chase would mail the card directly to an identity thief. And he used his cell phone number, much like a criminal would. He documented it all, mailed it all in and wondered what would happen.
The answer -- and the punch line -- wasn't long in arriving. Cockerham's card was mailed to the new address, his father's house, on March 4, less than a month after the tattered application had been sent in.
"I still can't believe it came," Cockerham told MSNBC.com. "Crazy.""
Take the application, take a big red magic marker and put a huge X on the application and write REFUSED. Put it in the prepaid envelope and mail it back. They have to pay the postage and pay someone to open that envelope. They dont send too many unsolicited offers after that.
"What if a desperate identity thief digging through your trash found a credit card application ripped into little pieces, taped it back together, filled it out and mailed it in? Would he get the credit card?
The answer, according to one man's experiment, is clearly yes.
Rob Cockerham is a credit card company's nightmare -- in this case, JP Morgan Chase & Co.'s nightmare. Armed with a roll of tape, a digital camera, a blog, a lot of irritation about those unsolicited credit card offers and a rapier wit, Cockerham set out to embarrass the company's credit card division about one month ago.
It was that mountain of credit card applications, so familiar to any adult American with a wallet, that drove Cockerham to perform his experiment.
"I get a heck of a lot of credit card applications in the mail," he writes. "I almost always tear them in half and throw them away. Sometimes, if I am feeling particularly paranoid, I'll tear them into little bitty pieces." But, he wonders in the blog, "Is that good enough?"
So he mimicked the steps an ID thief might take. He performed reconstructive surgery on a Chase MasterCard credit card application with Scotch tape. For good measure, he changed the address on the application, to see if Chase would mail the card directly to an identity thief. And he used his cell phone number, much like a criminal would. He documented it all, mailed it all in and wondered what would happen.
The answer -- and the punch line -- wasn't long in arriving. Cockerham's card was mailed to the new address, his father's house, on March 4, less than a month after the tattered application had been sent in.
"I still can't believe it came," Cockerham told MSNBC.com. "Crazy.""