A couple of days ago, I received a call from Bank of America regarding some fraudulent charges that had shown up on a credit card that I no longer use. Bank of America was great, they asked me some questions and told me not to worry about the charges because I would not need to pay for them. I assume that this is where most of these situations end; I closed the account and contacted the credit reporting agencies.
For me, however, this was only the beginning. I had also received a call from one of the online retailers that was concerned that the order he received was fraudulent, and he didn't want to send this order out until he had verified the order. A couple of things tipped him off. First, the credit card billing information that didn't match the shipping information, and second, the order was for several hundred dollars worth of the same book... in this case, a version of the bible.
So I verified that the order was placed fraudulently and ended up saving this guy several hundred dollars that he would have lost had he shipped the order. You see what happens is, the bank will end up debiting the retailer's account about 90 days later for the bad order value, and then it's on the retailer to follow-up and try to deal with the cops from there. And 90 days is usually way too long for the cops to catch the thief, not to mention the lack of interest on the part of the police, but that comes later.
So I received the shipping address from the retailer, and called the Trenton, NJ Police Department and spent nearly an hour on the phone with them trying to get them to fill out a report and investigate this crime that has taken place within their jurisdiction, only to be told that I needed to contact my local PD and file the report there.
This is where I tell you that the system is messed up and there's too much bureaucratic process involved for any of the law enforcement agencies to do anything about any of this. At this point I didn't have a name, phone number, or email address for the thief. So I called Bank of America and wrote down the information for each of the 9 online retailers where the thief had placed orders and started doing the detective work on my own.
One of the other retailers provided the phone number and the email address listed in this report and I used a reverse lookup on the address to find the name Jerry Bailey. Now, I'm not sure if this is the actual thief or if it's a neighbor of his or maybe one of his relatives, but that's the name I found, so that's the name I'm using in this report to hopefully get some answers and some legal action.
I then called the Anne Arundel County Police Department and filed a report with them. A 30-year veteran officer came to my house and took down all of my information. He then explained that the report he took was more of a courtesy than anything else and even though one of the retailers that I contacted had already shipped their product to the same Trenton address; they wouldn't be contacting the Trenton Police Department directly, again due to bureaucracy.
In the middle of all that, I also filed a complaint with the FTC and called Bank of America another time and gave them the Police Report number. I expect more to come of this complaint than from any of the law enforcement, government, credit, or banking organizations involved. And that is a shame!
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