A Real Life Horror Movie

My personal story of identity theft began with me heading to the movie theatre with my girlfriend on a Friday night, as I do every Friday night like clockwork. On this particular night we were going to see a new film that had come out, a horror film to be specific, that we had been dying to see for several months. While the movie turned out to be quite scary, what resulted from a minor error I made at the ticketing box office was a lot more horrifying than any horror movie could ever possibly be. In so many words, The Exorcist and The Shining combined don’t have anything on this true tale I’m about to tell!

You’d think with two ten dollar bills and a couple ones in your wallet you’d be able to comfortably take your girlfriend out for a movie date but this is the year 2009 where $11.50 per ticket is the norm, so I had to bust out the plastic on this night. Rifling through my wallet, I randomly pulled out one of my many credit cards (I stress the world many because my credit card obsession factors prominently into the events of the story) and slapped it onto the counter and under the little glass opening, into the waiting hands of the ticket giver. Simple enough transaction, right? Give the card, get the card and your tickets in return, enjoy the show. Well somehow, unbeknownst to myself, my girlfriend, and the theatre employee, I took the tickets but left the card on the counter. Maybe it was because I was in a rush (the reels were set to roll any second and I hate missing the trailers) or maybe I’m just a forgetful idiot but it happened and it triggered an agonizing string of events that has forever damaged my credit and my trust in humanity. Again, this is the year 2009 and people aren’t as stand up as they used to be. When Joe Schmo found my credit card sitting there on the counter, he did not drop it into the lost and found bin but rather, as i’d later find out, he purchased his own movie tickets with it. But movies weren’t the only thing that was on my dime for Mr. Schmo. It was only the beginning….

Now here’s where my credit card obsession of sorts comes into play. My wallet, at the time, was literally stuffed to the gills with the little plastic trouble makers. It’s a problem i’ve had ever since I found out at a young age that I could simply swipe a piece of plastic and buy whatever I wanted, no “real money” needed. Needless to say, when you have 20 credit cards, your wallet does not really reflect the loss of a single one. So for several months, I never noticed that anything was wrong. I never noticed that it was gone, and I never noticed that someone was furnishing their home with my money. It was as if I had never even left that credit card on the counter in the first place. I don’t check billing statements on most of my credit cards, another problem of mine, so I never noticed any fradulent charges coming in. Perhaps I’m at fault here but these problems of mine never really caused me too much of a problem and afterall, I never asked to have my property stolen. But enough of that, lets get to the juicy stuff.

The mistake most credit card thieves make, and believe me i’d know because I did a ton of research on the topic after my experience, is that they buy things online with the stolen card and then have them shipped to their own address. This usually results in an officer or two showing up on that particular doorstep when a fraud report is filed by the card owner. But what this Joe Schmo was doing, and you’ve gotta give him points for smarts, was he was ordering products online and then having them shipped to the home attached to the card : my home. How did I not notice several thousands of dollars of goods being delivered to my house over the course of a couple months? I work 8 hours a day, from 9 o clock in the morning till 5 o clock at night, every day, Monday through Saturday. And guess what? My girlfriend does too. You do what you gotta do when you’re trying to start a family. Being that this was in the winter, we were literally never home when the sun was up and our thief had done his homework and realized this fact. Since the mail does not come on Sunday anyway, our one day off, he knew that we would never be home Monday through Saturday, from at least 9 to 5. Of course he didn’t account for me catching a nasty cold on the job site, but more on that in a second. So this guy would order these products, have them delivered to my place of residence, sit in his car near my house and wait for the packages to be delivered on the doorstep, and then he would calmly waltz up to the front porch and walk away with the goods, nobody the wiser. But as I said, everybody has a sick day from time to time, and mine couldn’t have come at a better time….

So there I was laying down on my bed, sick as a dog, when I heard what sounded like a large vehicle pull up to the house and then what sounded like a heavy package being dropped off on the porch. Strange, I thought. I hadn’t ordered anything online and to my knowledge, my girlfriend hadn’t either. Intrigued enough to get up out of bed, I approached the door when I saw something even stranger than a strange package arriving at my house ; a man walking towards my porch! I observed him for a second, wondering what he was doing, and before I knew it he had snatched up the box and began walking off with it, as if he’d done it a million times before. Not weak enough from sickness to allow my package that I didn’t even think was mine to be stolen, I charged for the door, ripped it open, and screamed out to the man. Before I could even get the word “HEY!” out, he dropped the box, darted into his car, and sped off like Superman, so fast that I could not even process or remember a single letter or number on his license plate. I took the box inside. opened it up, and there lay a beautiful new Blu-ray player, priced at a hefty, according to the receipt inside, $250. My mind immediately went to my girlfriend ; had she picked this up for me as a present? I called her up. She had not. I checked the credit card number listed on the receipt. It had my name attached to it. Bewildered, I called up the credit card company and was notified of the horrifying news ; about 50 of these expensive purchases made in the last two months. All shipped to my address. It soon became very clear to me what had been going on. The fast moving Superman like gentleman trying to make off with the Blu-ray player I unknowingly purchased for him ; he was the culprit. To this date, he has still not been caught, although many innocent people in white LeSabres have been pulled over because of him. The balances still exist on my account, with no way to prove that I didn’t make those purchases until he is caught. I’ll give it to him, he was a clever criminal, but nobody is too clever for the American justice system and he will have his day in court.

Since there’s always a silver lining, something good did come out of all of this. The lessons learned here are to keep track of your credit cards and not have too may of them. Needless to say, I now own only two of them and I’m even trying to whittle that down to one. The rest have been payed off, canceled, and shred to pieces. And when I go to see the new Nicolas Cage movie this Friday night with my girlfriend, you can rest assured I’m paying in cash.

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