I then made a massive blunder. My father passed away last September, and my sisters and I are in the process of selling his house. The real estate agent was pushing for ID, and I obligingly – and very stupidly – emailed him a photo of my driver’s licence.
That’s when my real problems started. Furnished with credit card and driver’s licence, the criminals proceeded to set up a string of buy now, pay later accounts in my name.
And I then began to receive emails from buy now, pay later providers – humm, Openpay and LatitudePay, to be precise.
LatitudePay notified me of a request to reset my password, so I tried talking to their call centre to let them know that there must be some fraudulent activity because I did not even have an account with them, let alone a password.
I asked to be put forward to the fraud department, but in a decidedly Kafkaesque move, the person whom I was talking to refused to do so unless I provided them with more personal details.
After providing an extra few details, I started feeling extremely uncomfortable about handing over personal information over the phone, given I had been so recently scammed.
Humm was a frequent communicator, sending through a series of cheery emails letting me know that I had been approved for $1,000 credit, and that my credit card details had been changed.
I sagely ignored them all, assuming that they were part of an elaborate phishing scam.
But my anxiety started rising last week, as the messages from Openpay became…
