On February 5, my husband went to Circuit City to purchase a laptop as a Valentine's Day present for me. The laptop that I had owned had become highly unsafe to use because of a problem with the power cord so he decided to purchase one for me so he could stop worrying that something would happen with the one I owned.
He filled out a credit application and was informed that he had been approved with a $2000 credit limit. He went through the store's inventory and picked one that included everything that I had requested. They put the laptop on the new credit account that they had just opened for him with Chase Visa and he headed home to surprise me.
When he arrived home, he gave the laptop to me and I was beyond excited. It was everything I ever dreamed of and he was pretty happy too for being able to get it for me. Once it was started, we began the process of transferring all of my files and other information from the old laptop to the new one.
At some point during the transfer process, my husband realized that he had left his driver's license at the store since he was in such a hurry to get home to surprise me. He called the store and let them know that I would stop by in the morning to pick it up. He handed me some paperwork about the credit account and I set it to the side to file with the rest of our credit information.
About fifteen minutes after calling Circuit City to tell them about his license, his phone rang again. He picked up the credit line information and conversed for a few more minutes before hanging up and telling me what was happening.
The reason the store had called was because they had given him the wrong credit information and approval. The $1600 laptop was charged to another man's card and that man was in the store trying to find out why he couldn't charge anything to an account he had just opened. They hadn't even run my husband's credit, just handed him someone else's approval. Not a single one of the employees had looked at any part of the paperwork and noticed that the person they were selling this laptop to was signing a completely different name or that they were calling that person by a name completely different from the name on the credit paperwork.
Shortly after that, a Circuit City employee called back and asked that my husband return the laptop to them. It still upsets me to think about the expression on my husband's face when he told me that he had to take my Valentine's present back.
We deleted everything that we could and I'm hoping that Circuit City kept their promise that they would remove all traces of my personal information from the computer before they sell it again.
The main point of this is to warn everyone to be extremely careful with their personal information at this store. Obviously, they don't pay very close attention to what they are doing when it comes to this. As I flipped through the paperwork from the credit information, I discovered every bit of information I could possibly need to steal the identity of the person who was approved. I had his full name, home and work addresses, the amount of time at his job, what he did for a living, how much money he made per year and worst of all, his social security number.
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