My Family’s Money

Recently, I received a call from some poor, unfortunate, Indian soul on behalf of my credit card company asking me to subscribe to a credit protection service. Like I normally do, I politely listened to his spiel (he is a person after all). It went a little something like this:

“For the low, low price of $11 a month you will finally have someone who will protect you against the dastardly do-evilers that are out to steal your identity. The company will give you access to your credit reports from all three CRAs (Credit Reporting Agency) as well as your actual credit score, and you can access them everyday if you wanted to. They would also provide assistance in sorting out any false activity on your credit report (assistance that my hard selling Indian friend assured me would save me thousands of dollars). You can cancel at any time and get a full refund of the last months fee, and all you have to do is make a phone call. Now let me confirm your mailing address …”

That is where I had to intrude my comments and tell him kindly that I would not like to subscribe to the service. I didn’t want to pay $132 a year of money we don’t really have for a service I don’t think we need. Needless to say, my hard selling Indian friend wasn’t about to lose me. He went on and on about how great the product was and essentially gave me his pitch every time I let him know that I was not interested in the service. Three times we did this dance together before I had to firmly inform him before going into his pitch *again* that I would not like this service.

This got me thinking just how the compensation package for my hard selling Indian friend works. I mean there has to be something driving them to be so persistent with their pleas. I figure that it probably works like this – the company is looking to make an easy buck by preying on fear and by genuinely providing a service to the small percentage of individuals that actually suffer the terrors of severe identity theft. They figure that for every x individuals that they can get to subscribe to their service they will get x-n number of customers who either feel like they really need this service or who forget to cancel it. The vast majority of subscribers don’t need it so the company is getting paid for doing nothing, much like my company’s Payment Protection program. The company has a high incentive to induce customers to enroll in this service so they either put positive or negative pressure on their Indian call centers to get people enrolled. I would assume that they offer some type of bonus incentives based upon performance, whether it be in the form of faster promotions or some actual cash bonuses for a number of people enrolled, as well as negative incentives, such as firing those individuals who fail to meet certain standards. So my hard selling Indian friend is probably just a product of the work culture in which he lives.

He also got me thinking about what recourse do I have if I become became a victim. I mean, what would I do if I became one of those Citi commercials? I went on a quest of epic proportions and found a few online resources that are long, very extensive, and offer step-by-step instructions in case of identity theft. The Federal Trade Commission has a very good site dedicated to identity theft resources. In addition to telling what needs to be done they provide drafts of cover letters (example) as well as offer an online form to report your identity theft. They provide high quality information in a very accessible way in the clearest possible language. The other site that I found helpful was the the Identity Theft Resource Center. They offer essentially the same information as the Federal Trade Commission, but they have a section for State and Local resources that I found particularly informative, and interactive maps are always cool.

The material I looked at seemed to tell me three things:

1. Having your identity stolen sucks to your asmar, and then some – I hate having to deal with paper work and it seems like having your identity stolen equals mountains of paper work and careful records keeping
2. Get semi-informed now – there is so much information on these sites I can only imagine being a victim and getting discouraged by all the hoops I’ll have to jump through to clear my name
3. Getting your identity back is not simple, but doable – you’ll need persistence, patience, and plenty of bad knock-knock jokes to keep you laughing through the muck